Buen Camino, the review of the new film by Checco Zalone

Success as a driver of industry

Zalone has never hidden the importance of takings. He also reiterates this in the press conference, with a rare frankness in Italian cinema. It is not cynicism, but historical awareness: for decades the great successes of comedy have financed auteur cinema, the riskiest films, the least immediately profitable ones. A virtuous — and sometimes vicious — circle that has kept the industry afloat.

Good Way it also arises from this lucidity. It does not aspire to be a “high” film, nor a moral treatise. It wants to work

A protagonist who can’t (and doesn’t want) to do anything

Il Checco di Good Way he is a man who has never had to learn how to do anything. He inherited the money from his father, who made his fortune producing sofas. He openly boasts about it: he doesn’t know how to work, he doesn’t know how to do anything, he doesn’t feel the need to. He lives surrounded by luxury, yachts, servants, a Mexican model at his side, friends at his side.

For his fiftieth birthday he even had an Egyptian pyramid built in his garden, a definitive monument to an ego that no longer needs to justify itself. He doesn’t know how many continents there are, he is convinced that Mexico City is not a capital, he doesn’t know who Hemingway is and he names his daughter Cristal in honor of a brand of champagne. It’s not stupidity. From the protagonist’s point of view this is a privilege.

The body presenting the bill

Not surprisingly, the film opens with a visit to the Spanish urologist. Ring finger stuck where the sun doesn’t shine and a sentence that sounds like a gag but also like a poetic declaration: adulthood begins at fifty. Even before consciousness, it is the body that rebels.

In Inflamed Prostatethe song that crosses and closes Good Wayis not a simple comic catchphrase. It is the ideological heart of the film. The male body that betrays, the virility that deflates, the pain that becomes a crazy nursery rhyme. Awareness comes later, if it comes.

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In-depth analysis

Checco Zalone and Buen Camino, a film between lost fathers and comedy

The Camino de Santiago as sabotage

The Camino de Santiago is never truly spiritual. It’s physical, dirty, tiring, continually sabotaged. Checco faces it by bringing his world with him: fine wines passed off as farmer’s wine, legs of pata negra that rain down as if nothing had happened, a resort logic applied to pilgrimage.

The journey with the daughter thus becomes an elementary narrative device – a father and daughter who do not know each other – but precisely for this reason effective. Good Way It’s a simple story, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

In-depth analysis

Checco Zalone, the video of the new song La Prostata Inflamada

The cleverly incorrect jokes

Along the way come the most uncomfortable jokes: Gaza, September 11th, Schindler’s Listpilgrims obsessed with gerontophilia. Jokes intended to spark discussion, but the point is never the topic. It’s always the person who says them.

Those sentences belong to a rich, unaware man, protected by his status. I am the product of his spiritual misery. Good Way it certainly doesn’t ask the viewer to agree: it asks to laugh. And, laughing, to recognize each other. Because in the end, vis comica shows, through laughter, what we normally prefer to hide.

In-depth analysis

Good fireplace, the trailer and the plot of the new film by Checco Zalone

The final video clip: the truth of the body

To definitively clarify the nature of Good Way comes the video clip that closes the film, built around In Inflamed Prostate. Here Zalone distances himself from the story and exposes it openly as a mask: he becomes Joaqui Cortzion, he sings about physical pain, dysfunction, the humiliation of the male body that no longer responds to commands.

Next to him, Martina Miliddi as “chica” introduces a corporeal and sensual counter shot that neither consoles nor judges: she dances, crosses, accompanies. It is a deliberately pop and ramshackle moment that breaks the narrative illusion and reiterates the profound meaning of the film: there is no redemption, there is acceptance of fragility

In-depth analysis

Checco Zalone, the poster of the new film Buen Camino coming out at Christmas

The fool and the questions

The ending offers no solutions or pacification. We dance on the abyss. If something has changed, it is not because the protagonist has learned a lesson, but because he has crossed his own limit. The inflamed prostate remains, perhaps the consciences too.

Good Way It tells the present very well. It tells of an Italy that laughs, gets scandalized, gets indignant and then goes back exactly as it was before.

As in the great tradition of Italian comedy, the comedian does not provide answers. Ask questions. The fool talks about the world laughing at it, dancing on the edge of the abyss. Even — and above all — where the sun doesn’t shine.