1975
The visionary bomb exploded March 7, 1975. And on March 17th in record stores the soundtrack arrived that multiplied the shock. Ten years after its debut as a director with the criminal-absurd movie in black and white, Super rapina a Milano, Adriano Celentano surprised everyone by running away from a full of zombies and cement Milan to take refuge in a lagoon Venice but already attacked by petrochemical poisons. How about changing the entire human landscape as minimum program? Too much revolutionary? And Adriano realized Yuppy Du, the dock worker Felix, married with a daughter who finds his first wife believed dead, and loses everything, both his wifes and daughter… It’s a musical “apart”, the first of his combat graffiti in color, and his mobile frescoes of hand-to-hand combat between his “palace of the mind” and the Palazzo.
A movie shot not without problems of boats “rock” driving, and the torn flesh – Adriano and his bloody hands – will break more times the euphoric surface area of the dancing screen. But the “horse of the lagoon cowboy”, the gondola, is much more difficult to handle than in the West. Here it has meaning of escape, break, desertion, here connecting and socializing, as seen in the recent fight against super monster ships that invade the lagoon. To tame it, the pupparin, the Felice’s lopsided gondola, it takes cunning, luck and an ace up his sleeve. And, from the first scene of the film, we see Celentano, expert of the gesture and of the exact micro-movement, emotionally always right character, colliding with a metropolitan world which does not want to know anything about logic, common sense, ethics and transparency.
The Power to the imagination was all in this, shouted in the streets, in schools, factories and… in theaters. A detour. A change of the direction. Without imagination pushed to the extreme limits there is not Adriano-thought-image. The first sequence of Yuppi Du seems a matter of “rematologia descriptive” according to Pataphysics, the science that is close to non-sense. “Opera of the absurd”, risky, unique and international cultural ambition. In the film there are echoes of the situationists and their war contemporary urbanism, and games surrealist Bunuel from long range in the church, in the minuet-battle between rich and poor.
A prototype Eastmancolor, unique and incredibly strange, dreamy shot in the Venetian lagoon and through the narrow streets, with one of the biggest stars of the moment, Charlotte Rampling, in great shape, songs and ballets ever ornamental scenes colors and costumes that swingano by Arcimboldo in Dali. And Claudia Mori duetting with the androgynous body and look at lethal Rampling radiating sensuality and acting in perfect sync with the dada movement of Adriano.
An overproduction mysterious and fascinating Celentano writes, interprets, directs and fits with clockwork freedom, without ever using the rules of the musical genre, which, in competition at Cannes, won the international critics for anarchy architectural and choreographic sequences for dialogs from syllogisms inconclusive and indeterminate, so close to the truth, and the environment and climate “timeless”.
Contemporary masterpiece, Yuppi Du, renovated, remodeled and resubmitted to the Venice International Film Festival was inserted by the guru of the young European critics, German Olaf Moeller, one of the ten best films of 2008 in the annual ranking of the authoritative magazine Sight and Sound and approached for his “magical realism” impossible to travel by Kurt Vonnegut, political satire and black humor, Lewis Carroll, jazz musician of the word, and Hunter S. Thompson, king of the narrative artifice.
In Italy, the film hits the critical choreographic virtuosity, is evoked Vincente Minnelli, director of Gigi, because the musical numbers and dance flow spontaneously from the action with a trance effect. And again for the visual virtuosity, the superb work of cinematographer Alfio Contin, and landscape.
Today we reveal the amazing pre-vision of Yuppi Du continuously oscillate between suspended time of musical performance – the dancing going on stage, backstage, entr’actes almost “Goldoni” – and live time, “cinema”, data storage and historical-political iconographic simultaneous: the strike, ecological disaster, the church as it has evolved over time, as an instrument of defense of the poor living in the good of the ruling classes … A game that makes it powerful and mobile, that gives meaning to the image. Adriano maximum concentration in the stylization of form, each frame has its own internal movement surprising, in the eclectic eccentricity of manners, between the primitive and the futuristic style studio, all his “love”. The “faces of concrete,” the gray-Milan from toxic poisons, the bitter immorality of the sale of human flesh, the girl (Rosita, daughter of Claudia and Adriano), sold so much per pound, the exploitation of workers and the “white murders” . Sequence from Hitchcock geometry with the case hanging over the head of the port, the crane swing, and Death in conversation with the victim…
Treasures minted in Yuppi Du return to “furnish” the TV shows, movies and live performances of Adriano in a continuous metamorphosis. His voice turns the field of communication between “griot” and active public and not on the basis of a technological wonder, but a critical journey through time and space. Adriano raises in the future old forgotten things riplasmano the world. And here is the square multiethnic solar and crackling, flavors Four Steps in the Clouds and fairytale medieval. The curtain opens on the emotions of the artist lost and found resistant to the cynicism of the times.
Written by M. Ciotta