Direction: Gianni Amelio
Country: Italy
With Lord of the Ants, Italian director Gianni Amelio is far from his glory days, built on the basis of films such as Lamerica (1994) and Il Ladro di Bambini (1992). His newest effort is a biopic of the Italian poet, playwright and director Aldo Braibanti, who was jailed in 1968 due to a Fascist-era anti-gay law. He was sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of duress against an 18-year-old student who would become the love of his life.
The cast is not outstanding, apart from Luigi Lo Cascio (he made his debut in 2000 with Tullio Giordana’s One Hundred Steps) who plays the title character with intellectual superiority. The relationships between the characters seem contrived or detached from emotion in a somewhat cold, chewy film that doesn’t get better with time, not even when the camera is turned to a courtroom.
Amelio simply chronicles the facts and lets naivety take control of things. The dialogue goes from philosophical and poetic to sloppy and banal, while the characters don’t pull enough truth from a story that really happened but surely with a lot more intensity than it’s presented here. Lamentably, Lord of the Ants, even demonstrating solid values at its core, loses its voice to torpidity.
