The middle school years are difficult and 'Dear Cruel World' knows it well The film premiered at the Rome Film Fest and will arrive in theatres from October 22

Dear Cruel World is a familiar but original work. It has the familiar air of coming of age, but the unusual and punk soul of its screenwriters, Francesco Turbanti and Niccolò Falsetti, the latter also a director. It has characters that we may have already encountered in Italian cinema, and not only that, but to express the inner nature of the protagonist Giovanna (the young Aurora Malianni) she uses the drawings of a Zerocalcare at the service of someone else's story and not of one of her Netflix series.

Dear Cruel World, the plot of the film in theaters from October 22

The film tells of a probable suicide. A middle school kid who has not been heard of after his disappearance, an escape that could end with the most tragic of answers. The student is the best friend of the protagonist Giovanna, who seeks answers that adults cannot give her, taking refuge in her fantasy world in which her deceased father, a unicorn with bows and sometimes Santa Claus invade her head in an animated version, trying to help her face the first unforeseen events of existence. Problems that begin to be painful and heavy as early as middle school, the same period in which, however, you can try to build your armor to face the world, even better if at the side of unlikely but faithful friendships.

A regional cinema, but in a good way

What is most striking about Niccolò Falsetti's work is the authentic and unfiltered characterization of the region to which he belongs and of its municipalities, which are increasingly decentralized and isolated (this time the story is set in Albinia). But more than anything else, the film reveals the feeling of living in those territories, where the language of middle school children is the same for everyone, but then has its own specificity from city to city, from province to province. Here, we must specify that the film is set in 1999. The Internet had not packed the idioms in today's continuous trends and micro trends, with curses and expressions so specific that they catapult the viewer into the school, into the streets and places inhabited by the characters.

Dear Cruel World is an original and bewildered film

What is unknown will shake the protagonist's normality. Teased by her peers, unaware of the sexual practices that her classmates begin to talk about and discovering herself in harmony with the school bully, for Giovanna the typical gap to adulthood will open up, which for some is traumatic. Thanks to the never superficial lightness of Falsetti and Turbanti, however, this theme frees itself from certain conventions to become unique, in a work with a well-formed personality. Dear Cruel World is a film that is not always very focused on the screenplay, too random where more concreteness was needed to go deep, but still unique and bewildered to the point of reflecting the spirit of its authors, who have not replicated Margini's magic formula, but that is no less interesting to follow.