Grazie Ragazzi, the Italian remake of the French Un Triomphe by Emmanuel Courcol (2020) is the latest film by Riccardo Milani which depicts a tragi-comic picture of Antonio (Antonio Albanese) an often out of work actor, who accepts a job offered by an old friend and colleague, Michele (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) as a teacher of a theatre workshop within a prison, managed by a sceptical Laura (Sonia Bergamasco).
Milani touches upon the everlasting issue of rehabilitation and re-educating of people who committed crimes and asks the viewers to observe these prisoners without judgment, not as prisoners but simply as actors.
Similar to Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the raw characters (the prisoners) do need Antonio (though they do not know it yet), and it is Antonio who will soon find out how much he needs them. Not just to relaunch his career but to discover a world within walls, bars and order – a world which is more profound than it appears from outside. There is talent where you least expect to find it. Just give it a chance, and someone inside a prison might even perform Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, brilliantly.
However, this film is not as absurd. It is uplifting, comic, touching and awakening to the reality that many people face and to what can be done to help our society to better itself.
Riccardo Milani interests in ‘special’ characters started with the iconic film of the late ‘90s, La Guerra degli Anto’, which depicts a group of young unemployed from Southern Italy who are trying to find their place in this world by embracing the ‘90s Punk fashion for which they were (mis)judged and ridiculed. They all looked to places far from where they were not accepted: to England; just as a young Adrien Brody in the spectacular Summer of Sam by Spike Lee, also late ‘90s, ridiculed and ostracised by the New York Italian community, had London as a landmark of freedom.
Freedom that these prisoners might find, after all, through the theatre.