Why do people drink so much in Veneto? The answer is in a movie

They made a film to tell the story of the Venetians’ relationship with alcohol, and it all adds up. It’s called “The Cities of the Plain”, and it’s very apt right from the title.

“Let’s go and have the last one in Venice, right?” The meaning of the film could start from here, from a proposal that Doriano launches to Carlobianchi in front of a table full of empty bottles of non-alcoholic beer. “The cities of the plain”, by Francesco Sossai, distributed by Lucky Red and from last October 2nd in cinemas throughout Italy. Doriano and Carlobianchi are two fifty-year-olds, penniless, wrinkled by events but above all drunk, whose the only reason for living lies in the search for the last glasson an alcoholic pilgrimage in a contemporary Veneto, of which Venice and the Treviso area represent the brackets within which the story unfolds.

Why is it called “The cities of the plain”

Trying to explain why “The Cities of the Plain” is so special, why it is a small provincial masterpiece, why it finally manages to tell the story of the Veneto by moving away from an often caricature narrative made up of actors lent to an irreplicable dialect and clichés that never seem to stray too far from Goldoni’s servant girls and Polentoni’s labels, is in reality a simple thing: it is first and foremost a film about friendship, about the ability to surprise and disarming how certain unlikely encounters can help not so much to grow (“we’re too old to grow up now” is one of the most serious lines in the film) but to look at life in a non-aligned but courageous way.

There is no real plot, except an unrolling of places and situations immersed in the humidity of Venice and the immobility of solitary villages planted in the Treviso countryside, chasing the last glass together with Giulio, a reserved architecture student at the IUAV who will find himself involved in the adventures of the two friends.

The Venetians’ relationship with alcohol is the plot

At the end of the preview of the film which was held in Mestre and at which the director was present, a lady at a certain point raised her hand to comment: “It made me very sad to see these two alcoholics, who spend their days drinking without a purpose“. Words that remained in mid-air, in a full room that had instead perfectly grasped the meaning of a work that finally manages – and it couldn’t be otherwise thanks to a Venetian director – to tell the very special relationship that the inhabitants of the region have (for years identified as the land of warehouses and small-medium industry) they have with alcohol.

A relationship that excludes thirst at the start: in Veneto you don’t drink alcohol because you’re thirsty. Alcohol is an aggregator, a social accelerator, a basis on which to build more or less lasting human relationships. You don’t drink alone, you share glasses anticipating thoughts and reflections between friends, you meet in your favorite bar to be and feel part of a community while outside the world has frayed and hasn’t kept the promises it made. But alcohol is also a powerful medicinal balm that helps you forget.

In Veneto we drink out of resignationto make disillusionments bearable (and the 2008 crisis in the film describes them well), because at a certain moment you give up. Above all, as one of the protagonists says, “the desire to drink wine never runs out”, even compromising the theory of decreasing marginal utility, according to which the perceived benefit for the good consumed decreases as the consumption of that good increases: well, the pleasure of drinking never ends, just as there is never a last glass. The friendship of Doriano and Carlobianchi is generous and spreads thanks to wine, ending up including a third, unexpected element, Giulio in fact, sober to the point of not even drinking coffee.

The list of what you drink in “The Cities of the Plain” is long: forgetting the non-alcoholic beer (“Miss excuse me but this beer has a strange taste…”. “It’s non-alcoholic”), There are the glasses of wine from Bacareto da Lele in Venice whose cup fits in the palm of one hand, the Calimochoil Gin Tonic, the correct plum coffeeit is not missing spritz, the carafes of house wine, the pot-bellied glasses of grappa and even a Daiquiri with two drops of Pernaud.

But the one accomplished by the three characters it is also a gastronomic journeywhich includes, in no particular order, the sandwiches of Lele’s scam – an essential reference for entire generations of Venetians, students and tourists (a bacon sandwich and a cotto and horseradish sandwich are mentioned in the film) and which in a handful of square meters contains a good part of the essence of the lagoon city – the snails – who have the task of telling, after the lagoon, the hinterland and the countryside – followed by bread and salami or better yet, sopressa.

There is a dangerously seductive shrimp cocktail served in an eloquent cup whose pink sauce perfectly summarizes the sense of the 80s, and above all there is an ice cream that arrives at the end, giving the spectator, despite the balls ending up on the ground in the middle of a highway, the meaning of life so evoked at the beginning.

The cinematic and literary echoes of “The Cities of the Plain” are many: Il Sorpasso, the works of Carlo Mazzacurati, those of Andrea Segre and Aki Kaurismaki, and those of Vitaliano Trevisan and Francesco Maino. In addition to the melancholic and minor humanity which is somewhat the common trait of the authors remembered, however, there is also – finally – the ability to narrate today’s Veneto with a never judgmental but at the same time very lucid gaze, picking up a thread that seemed to have been broken. “The cities of the plain” is a film about wine and friendship which, if elsewhere they can also proceed separately, in Veneto evidently, they are unable to do so and perhaps they don’t even want to.