That thin green line...

While Adolf Hitler was democratically elected in Germany, in Athens Le Corbusier led the IV “Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM)” embracing his ideas. They both had a clear and very structured “vision” for a new engineered society... and a better world, at least according to their perspective, of course. It was 1933.

At a later stage Hitler created concentration camps made of barracks far away from cities, for secluding there non Aryan people, while Le Corbusier and his followers projected and built concentration camps made of concrete, where stuffing and isolating from the rest of the population the least fortunate inhabitants of cities. There are huge differences between the two ill minded “projects”, being the first brutal and the second more sophisticated, but they were somehow united by the goal of keeping “pariah” far away from “normal people’s” eyes: in the first case people belonging to a different “race”, in the second people belonging to the lowest social classes. They were all “removed” from cities' living cores.

Coherently, the engineered and absolutistic vision of life (for a functionalist world) was taking form. No matter how, but it was. And, even if at different levels, they both were crimes against humanity.

Anyway, while the defeat of Nazism stopped the atrocities of a sick ideology, Le Corbusier’s followers kept on infesting the world with appalling buildings, sort of open-air jails, where all that people not belonging to the fortunate middle and upper classes were isolated. Corviale is one the most infamous examples.

Why such an important prologue for a mediocre comedy like Scusate se esisto!? Because in my opinion there is a thin line (a blood-red line, and not a green line) that it is possible to draft between Benigni’s masterpiece La vita è bella [Life Is Beautiful] and this film: they both make an attempt of dealing with irony with two tragedies of the XX century. While Benigni magically manages to describe with lightness the atrocities of a Nazi concentration camp, without becoming banal or superficial and still condemning such a tragedy, in Scusate se esisto! the levity of the description tends to become frivolous, trite, inconsistent, cheap. Moreover, Riccardo Milani and Paola Cortellesi (screenwriters of Scusate se esisto!) with such a light comedy sneakily transmit an almost subliminal (but dangerous) ungrounded (and immoral) message: the “Corviale monster” is a place where – introducing some minor changes – it would be possible to live. And be happy to live there!

The film ends saying “the thin green line” project for transforming Corviale form hell into paradise exists, it is real! Wow, so it was not just a silly comedy? There is a real silly architect behind it as well! Anyway, in their film they forget to explain how such an insane idea could take form. Just dealing with practical matters: how could they force out part of its inhabitants, kicking out people living there, for creating in it services? Moreover, for a similar amount of money, why pegging away with the (impossible) idea of rehabilitating a disgraceful edifice, that is falling apart and where no free soul would ever decide to live in, instead of tearing it down and replace it with decent and ecofriendly houses?

I better avoid further comments. I already dedicated too much time to Corviale.

For the rest, the movie offers some hilarious moments. But watch out! They might be there just for sweetening the bitter pill they want you to swallow...