ANIMALI NOTTURNI

E' mai possibile che Tom Ford sappia fare solo capolavori? E la cosa più strana è che è solo al suo secondo film! Sono passati sette anni dalla sua opera prima A Single Man e ancora ne teniamo calorosa memoria. Questa volta cambia decisamente registro tematico e raddoppia la sfida scegliendo di trasporre sul grande schermo il romanzo Tony & Susan di Austin Wright, un ardito e violento noir ordito come 'storia nella storia'. E nasce il secondo capolavoro! Un capolavoro non solo persino più sofisticato ed evoluto del primo ma anche dello stesso libro. Lo sceneggiatore e regista Tom Ford con Animali notturni, già vincitore del Gran Premio della Giuria al Festival di Venezia 2016, entra così di diritto - all'altezza della sua sola seconda prova, fuori dall'entourage della moda in cui si è formato diventandone una delle firme più glamour del settore - nell'olimpo dei cineasti d'autore. Un

artista a tutto tondo nel senso più vivo e pieno del termine. E la sua dote più preziosa trionfa letteralmente in Animali notturni. E' una questione di stile, appunto!

Per capire di cosa stiamo parlando - tralasciamo la locandina del film che già parla da sola! - non dobbiamo fare neppure tanta strada. E' subito chiaro fin dallo scioccante inizio. Un lungo piano sequenza in cui è protagonista una carnalità decadente, letteralmente in rovina, nel raccapricciante show di una sorta di quei fenomeni da baraccone un tempo indicati come 'donna cannone'. Una 'maschera' di felliniana memoria, rivoltante e tristemente dolente. Il dolore cangia in quello sguardo altro da un corpo tanto disfatto quanto impegnato in una danza che sfugge dalla stessa sensualità cui intenderebbe richiamarsi. E' subito chiaro, appena si allarga l'obiettivo, che Tom Ford si affida all'Arte come prima protagonista, per introdurre la sua 'doppia storia'. E' difatti proprio

di Arte che si tratta: una 'Installazione-Live' contemporanea tra le varie che girano in tondo in una stanza, mentre altre duplicazioni della stessa figura femminile, adagiate su basi-letto ammiccano diversamente ad altre ferite ed altro dolore. E il dado è tratto per il primo motivo firma: il silenzio e poche immagini rubate all'arte scrivono alcuni dialoghi importanti della sceneggiatura di Animali notturni. E non è neppure difficile coglierne i nessi, i collegamenti, la natura dialogica con gli altri personaggi.

Un preambolo ingombrante che apre il nostro sguardo sulla prima vera protagonista, la gallerista che ha curato l'allestimento, la Susan di Amy Adams, impeccabile e bellissima quanto tristemente insoddisfatta. A Tom Ford basta una sequenza in casa tra lei e il marito per fornircene tutti i motivi, nella maniera più elegantemente rapida, eppure efficace come un colpo secco al torace. Ferite e dolore interiori soppressi dalla maschera di perbenismo borghese del buon

viso a cattiva sorte. L'arrivo di un pacco con un libro pubblicato dall'ex marito Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal pure gioca al raddoppio calandosi anche nei drammatici panni dell'antieroe Tony del libro), che dopo anni e anni di silenzio la invita alla lettura chiedendole un giudizio, innesca quella 'storia nella storia' che lo speciale sodalizio tra regia ed interpretazioni, letteralmente immense - singolari anche i ruoli satellitari di Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Laura Linney e Jena Malone - rende Animali notturni non solo un inquietante thriller ad alta tensione ma un magico esperimento, in grado di intersecare uno scavo interiore complesso a più piste, fatto di amore, desiderio, ambizione, indulgenza e vendetta umane, con la leggerezza del battito d'ali di una farfalla.

E il dado è tratto per il secondo motivo firma, tanto cruciale quanto spiazzante. La straordinaria capacità di Tom Ford di riuscire a sintetizzare in un solo, assolutamente silente, fotogramma,

volubile e mobile come gli umori dei personaggi - la sua macchina da presa riesce a fare miracoli in tal senso! - pagine e pagine, persino capitoli di un racconto. E riesce a farlo accrescendone la potenza, pur risultando lieve e talora impalpabile. Dominano le ombre su una fotografia generosamente chiaroscurata e i campi stretti, quasi opprimenti, nelle auto così come negli intensi notturni disseminati nelle desolate lande texane. C'è da rimanere allibiti di quanto Tom Ford riesca a dire in quel modo. Cavalcando il McGuffin pilota con le vicende dei protagonisti del romanzo inviato e dedicato, che Susan/Adams legge ad intermittenza scoprendo ammiccamenti e verità personali sotterranee, Ford sfoglia i pensieri dei protagonisti che si avviluppano nelle loro menti, sull'onda delle associazioni d'idee, come se stesse navigando sull'olio, snocciolando al contempo manciate di iconici oggetti simbolo: una fede matrimoniale al dito in uno scorcio di corpi nebulosi che passa

sullo schermo sforbiciando un intero capitolo sul tradimento, l'ammiccante divano rosso o l'altrettanto ammiccante colore verde dell'abito di Susan. Tanto per fare pochi esempi. I colori di una vendetta sottile, impalpabile (della cui flebile percezione parla ancora una volta l'arte, come il dipinto in galleria, in una sequenza in cui dominano il bianco e nero, in un afflato metafisico alla Kubrick. Una vendetta assorbita quasi senza accorgersene, come un veleno a lenta cessione, rilucente in un incontro ravvicinato della macchina da presa con uno scorcio minimalista dello sguardo liquido della protagonista. Lo sguardo della scoperta della vera se stessa, della consapevolezza, di un'attesa illusoria, amarissima.

Featurette 'La storia d'amore':

Tom Ford's first film since 'A Single Man' is another winner, an ambitious high-wire noir thriller with Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal in an explosive tale of love, violence, and revenge.

A nice, polite, middle-class man goes after the homicidal goons who brutalized his wife and daughter — the plot of the 1974 Charles Bronson film “Death Wish,” and a thousand revenge thrillers just like it. Torn between romance and money, a woman betrays the sensitive fellow she loves to go with the wealthy player who can provide the life she desires — a plot that goes back to Edith Wharton and Douglas Sirk, or maybe “Dallas.” “Nocturnal Animals,” the first film Tom Ford has written and directed since his stunning debut feature, “A Single Man,” in 2009, draws its lurid, heavy-breathing elements from deep inside the well of pulp and noir and soap opera. (It’s based on Austin

Wright’s 1993 novel “Tony and Susan.”) Yet Ford, the celebrated fashion designer, doesn’t just recycle pulp — he aestheticizes it by taking it dead seriously. He strives to turn pulp into art.

“Nocturnal Animals,” which premiered today at the 73rd International Venice Film Festival, is a suspenseful and intoxicating movie — a thriller that isn’t scared to go hog-wild with violence, to dig into primal fear and rage, even as it’s constructed around a melancholy love story that circles back on itself in tricky and surprising ways. With Amy Adams as a posh, married, but deeply lonely Los Angeles art-gallery owner, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the novelist from her past who finds himself trapped in a nightmare, the movie has two splendid actors working at the top of their game, and more than enough refined dramatic excitement to draw awards-season audiences hungry for a movie that’s intelligent and sensual at the

same time.

At a glance, “Nocturnal Animals,” with its hot glare of sex and violence, seems like a totally different animal from “A Single Man,” which was a magic-hour L.A. period piece about a refined gay professor in the pre-liberation era. Yet there’s an organic link between them. The Colin Firth character in “A Single Man” may have been conservative and closeted, but he was rapturously romantic — and Ford, in one of the most daring moves in modern gay cinema, portrayed that very romanticism in ways that linked it to a more repressed era. He tapped into the richness of feelings that could only be expressed underground. “Nocturnal Animals,” too, is a movie by a born romantic — only now, the love he portrays is threatened by a scary and corrupt world.

The credits sequence is an outrageous grabber: a series of heavy-set women, nearly nude, jiggling in slow motion and

leering into the camera like middle-aged burlesque strippers, while music that’s voluptuous and forlorn enough to have been composed by Bernard Herrmann (the score is by Abel Korzeniowski) floods the soundtrack. It turns out that we’re watching an art installation at the gallery owned and curated by Susan Morrow (Adams), and what it expresses, in a very extreme way, is everything our junky cosmetic culture doesn’t “allow.” It’s a rebuke to moneyed perfection.

We soon see what Susan is rebelling against. She lives in one of those steely modernist L.A. mansions that seems designed not to be touched by human hands, and her marriage to the distant, model-handsome Hutton (Armie Hammer), who is some sort of financial heavy, has clearly entered its ice-cold death phrase. What’s more, their life of luxury has become a sham; they are actually broke, and trying to keep up appearances as Hutton jets off to New

York to prop up another deal.

The whole setup borders on silver-spoon cliché, but then Ford leads us into another world. Susan has been sent the manuscript of a novel, entitled “Nocturnal Animals,” written by her ex-husband, Edward (Gyllenhaal), with whom she hasn’t spoken for 19 years. She puts on her big glasses, opens the book, and starts reading, and that leads into an extended sequence of hypnotizing intensity: Edward, along with his wife and teenage daughter, are on a trip, driving through West Texas in the middle of the night (they’ve decided to do the road equivalent of a red-eye), when a car starts to pull up beside them and force them off the road. Inside the car are three nasty, drawling delinquent varmints, the kind we’ve seen in movies countless times before, but Ford has staged this encounter with a frighteningly existential, this is really happening bravado that keeps

you riveted.

The leader of the gang is Ray, played in long black sideburns by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who gives this taunting sociopath a strange kind of depth. On some level, the sequence is pure redneck-gothic craziness (think “Death Wish” meets “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”), and on another level it’s an all-too-real domestic dreamscape of sexual terrorism in which Edward, apart from his fear and loathing, is forced, at every turn, to confront that he’s too “weak” to solve this situation with the kind of heroic action we’re used to: by meeting violence with violence. The movie says, implicitly, that he’s not Bronson or Liam Neeson — he’s you or me.

Each time the film cuts back to Adams reading the novel, we’re reminded that none of this may even have happened. But it sure feels like it did. The movie then intercuts what transpired 20 years ago between Susan and Edward,

who grew up together in Texas and wound up in New York, where they reunited and got married. We see the sincerity of their love, but also how the worm of professional failure eats away at their relationship — exactly as Susan’s tough-broad Texas martini-swilling Republican mother, played (in a brilliant turn) by Laura Linney, predicted. There’s an echo of the same conflict that powers “La La Land,” a conflict that is very much of the moment: Can love survive in an age when people who want to be artists have been left with almost no economic foundation? Edward is trying to write novels, and until he succeeds it looks like he might spend his life working in a bookstore, but that’s not enough for Susan — and we understand why. She’s not portrayed as greedy; she just wants a life. And so she destroys the one she has.

Here, as

in “A Single Man,” Ford’s staging is staid and classical, elegant and at times a touch overdeliberate, although he’s ambitious without being pretentious. Ford is a true moviemaker — a social observer who’s a junkie for sensation and narrative. He has structured “Nocturnal Animals” beautifully, so that the past truly feeds into the present, and fiction into reality. Edward, still ensnared by what happened in West Texas, gets to know a small-town Texas cop, played by Michael Shannon with a mean glint of a suspicion that, at first, makes it seem like he’s not much interested in helping this Yankee. But the two men form a fascinating bond. Gyllenhaal’s performance goes to a place of real terror and despair, and when the movie flashes back, he, along with Adams, seems younger, possessed by a more vital spirit. “Nocturnal Animals” is on some level a cautionary tale about the false gods

that can lead one to make the wrong choices.

It must be said that other refined movies have gone to these places before. The granddaddy of them all is “Blue Velvet,” the great postmodern Hitchcockian noir that turned pulp sensation into a surrealist high. Then there was “In the Bedroom,” which may be the most sophisticated revenge thriller ever staged; it was like a Bronson movie made by Merchant-Ivory. “Nocturnal Animals” isn’t as good as those films, yet it seizes and holds you — with its suspense, and its vision. It leaves no doubt as to Tom Ford’s fervor and originality as a director, and it leaves you hoping that he’ll make his next film before another seven years passes by.