Review: Futura Is a Haunted Portrait of Young Italian Lives at a Standstill

Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher’s Futura is attuned to the dreams and anxieties of people on the brink of adulthood. Journeying across Italy, the filmmakers interview farmers, students, actors, boxers, among others. And given the uniformity of the disillusionment that they capture, it’s almost as if they’re driving in circles.

While the interviews cover a wide range of contexts, almost everyone has similar complaints. From Milan to Palermo, they speak of how there aren’t any jobs for them, that Italy is “asleep,” that it doesn’t care about its young people, and that the government is only interested in pensions and immigration issues. They also seem to agree that Italian schools are excellent. And it shows, as their eloquence and wit are disarming, and just as consistent as their hopelessness, which makes the whole scenario all the more heart-wrenching.

Futura’s subjects are vulnerable, and their already wasted hunger for the world is exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Marcello, Munzi, and Rohrwacher, among Italy’s most prominent contemporary filmmakers, must have struggled over how to proceed with this work centered around dozens of on-camera testimonies, given that they went into production at the start of the pandemic. And they find just the right tone and cinematic strategy to deal with the destabilizing consequences of Covid, incorporating it into the narrative as yet another social malaise holding young Italians back from achieving their full potential.

The fact that social distancing measures take on unpredictable patterns throughout the production, both allowing and not allowing the subjects to huddle together in front of the camera, seems to further dramatize their very existential condition. Futura’s voiceover narration works as a self-reflective and unified account of the filmmakers’ own emotional response to these impossible, and somehow fitting, circumstances. Together with a refreshingly frugal usage of classical music, the film gives us an eerily palpable sense of the effects of the pandemic on the already precarious lives of young people, while embodying—in its very visual language—the sort of creativity that can turn liabilities into assets.

Some of the most striking sequences in the film allow the pandemic’s presence to unabashedly inhabit the frame, as in a scene at a culinary school where some of the interviewees don uniforms and masks. Close-ups on their faces highlight the surreal and perverse nature of the disaster: a near-apocalyptic situation leading already-despairing young Italians to their breaking point. The filmmakers stage the scene in a way that makes the less pragmatic aspects of the masks come to the surface. They become much stranger, richer props.

The young who were so eager to live, so self-aware and committed to articulating their feelings, are now prostrated, resigned, muffled. They’re defeated but still presumably open to regeneration. These people who, before the end of life as they knew it, expressed resentment toward the internet for severing links to what truly matters are now forced to be even more immersed in social media in order to nurture a semblance of still being tethered to the world.

It’s a world apparently doomed to learn nothing from its calamities, considering that students who currently attend Genoa’s Armando Diaz School know nothing about the raid that took place in their school 20 years earlier, when police brutally attacked and tortured anti-globalization forces occupying the building. The documentary takes on a disturbing sci-fi aura in these moments, when its youth appear drained from the past, exhausted by the present, and cut off from any future they can imagine, rather faithfully captures the spirit of our times.