There is an art that cinema has always denied itself: smell. We can see and hear it, not smell it. The visionaries of Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama tried it over half a century ago; the genius of bad taste John Waters played with his scratch cards (Polyester's Odorama, 1981). So, when a novel opens with the most anti-cinematic phrase imaginable, "My mother stinks", the bet seems lost from the start. Yet Edoardo De Angelis, with The fire you carry inside, presented in competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival (where it competed for the Golden Lion under the jury of Maggie Gyllenhaal), managed to evaporate that stench from the screen. A material film, a real smell, in which you would swear you could smell the fried baby anchovies, the parmigiana, the oil mixed with the smoke from Angela's perpetually lit cigarette.
The novel on which it is based is the memoir-novel with which Antonio Franchini (Marsilio, 2024) recounted the life and death of his mother, a woman who embodied, without discount, all the vices of Italy: indifference, classism, opportunism, resentment. The form of comedy, the content of tragedy. Everyone said he was unadaptable. De Angelis, together with the screenwriters Francesco Piccolo and Ilaria Macchia, performed the act of courage: compressing an entire existence into a Christmas Eve in Milan and little more. Because, as the director confesses in the notes, Angela is a figure that attracts and repels him, and to face her he only has one weapon left: cinema.
She is always at the center of the scene. Vanessa Scalera lends Angela a body and a language that are already geography of the soul. In the press conference, the actress revealed that she approached her not so much as a mother, but as a woman, "almost a lover", fascinated by her own son: and this is the difference that makes the character both unbearable and magnetic. There is one joke, among many, that is worth the entire film. Naples, says Angela, comes from fire and rock; Milan is marshy, muddy. In that diptych there is everything: the fire that the title evokes is her, chthonic and volcanic, while the swamp is the northern refuge in which the son sought refuge. So much so that De Angelis, who has mixed half of Italy in the Neapolitan koinè of his cinema, knows well that the most particular language is the one that all peoples can understand.
The real duel, however, is the one between Scalera and Lino Musella, who is Angela's son Antonio, a successful publisher (not a writer: and the distinction, for the mother, is a condemnation). The two said they worked by observing each other, without speaking, to stage the unsaid that separates and unites a mother and son. The result is a sentimental melee in which every caress is a scratch, every dish an accusation.
Around the table, De Angelis arranges a catalog of small domestic cruelties that anyone who has had a family will recognize with a shiver. There is no nativity scene in that Milanese house (a mortal sin: and how can we not think of Luca Cupiello's «Te pleasant 'o presepio?», that Christmas in the Cupiello house by Eduardo De Filippo which De Angelis himself had already staged for Rai). The nephew studied classical dance (and here the director winks, describing himself as an "overweight classical dancer"). It is decided, with wicked timing, to leave for the mountains the day after Christmas. And the Milanese daughter-in-law (a very precise Elena Radonicich) orders dinner from the rotisserie, so as not to touch anything that her mother-in-law has cooked. It seems like the eve of a Fantozzi who turned to the dark side, with no one to dilute the tragedy into farce, and the laughter remains strangled in the throat.
In this Edwardian theater turned to black everyone shines. Ivana Lotito, very good, is the daughter Paola who her mother doesn't seem to deign to even look at, and it is precisely in that marginality that she builds her most poignant character. Tommaso Ragno, always magnificent, is the successful writer Giulio Simonetti, author of essays and novels: the man that Antonio did not become, the mirror in which his mother accuses him of an alleged weakness. Because Angela's real wound, like that of many mothers, is that her son is not an improved version of himself. Franchini, who wrote while keeping his mother at a distance from the literary character, found, through mysterious ways, the essence of that woman in Scalera.
Shot with ancient craftsmanship and a steady hand, the film finds in Vladan Radovic's photography and Lorenzo Peluso's editing the closed and suffocating space of a house that becomes an arena. The soundtrack of La Niña heals the wounds, built around a shadow that wanders through the rooms like a ghost: for the musician he is a child, but everyone will see what they want in it. There is mysticism at the root of this work, and the right choice, as La Niña herself said, is not to dissolve it but to welcome it. Also because the case, here, was written in his own hand: the copy of the novel arrived at De Angelis' home on 10 July, the anniversary of his grandmother's death. A synchronic message impossible to ignore.
If The fire you carry inside were a cocktail it would be the Chthonic, which steals its name from the "chthonic fury" with which Marsilio describes the novel. Aged dark rum (the fire that is carried inside, the heat of the South), a strong bitterness (the rancor, the tragic part that boils under the comedy), late mandarin juice (the only sugar on Christmas Eve), the glass first rinsed with a peated and smoked distillate (the oil mixed with cigarette smoke), to garnish a bay leaf burnt on the edge (the kitchen fumes, the anchovies, the parmesan). Served in a low glass, made of lava rock if possible. To be sipped slowly, because it is hot, and to never be completely finished: like the bond between a mother and a son.
After the war period as Comandante, De Angelis returns to Naples (that fire from which he had detached himself, and which calls him back to itself) and signs one of the best Italian films in Competition. Ninety-four minutes that alternate between laughter and stomach clenching, without ever resolving the ambivalence: because Angela, like everything that really matters, attracts and repels in the same inexplicable measure. There is no pacification, there is no consolatory morality, there is no easy redemption. There is a love that burns like an inexhaustible fire, which no separation, nor even the inevitable, will ever be able to extinguish. And when the lights come back on, that smell remains: of fried food, of smoke, of home. The stink, in fact, that Franchini put on the front line and that De Angelis, against all odds, managed to get off the screen. Presented as a world premiere on 9 September 2026, the film will be distributed in Italian cinemas by 01 Distribution.
