Venice 2023: Opening film "Comandante" and the latest from Liliani Cavani
Thursday, August 31, 2023 at 8:00AM by Elisa Giudici
Edoardo De Angelis & Pierfrancesco Favino on the set of "Comandante"
Opening the Venice Film Festival is a daunting enough challenge. Now imagine being called in as a last-minute replacement for Luca Guadagnino’s new film starring Zendaya. Yet, Edoardo De Angelis managed to uphold the honor of Italian cinema admirably. His new film Comandante stands as a notable piece of filmmaking, injecting an interesting angle into the war subgenre of submarine films. To put it in perspective, it holds its own against the likes of The Wolf's Call, a recent European film of similar ambition from 2019, which boated a budget twice the size of Comandante.
A budget of 14 million euros isn't trivial within the national cinematic landscape, where the majority of yearly productions hover around the 1 to 2 million euro mark. This significant financial backing primarily went into meticulously recreating the interior and exterior spaces of the Cappellini submarine. Surprisingly, this endeavor was complicated by the scarcity of photographic references for the original ship or its close counterparts. De Angelis's film underscores a poignant historical reality: the majority of Italy's 120 submarines utilized during World War II met their demise, their crews were lost at sea, resting beneath coral crosses...