Edoardo Leo rereads Shakespeare’s Othello, setting it in the world of the Roman underworld and translating it into a dialect that enhances the ferocity of the story and the madness of a sick passion, in his new film, “I am not what I am”, arriving in cinemas Thursday 14 November. In this tragedy of possession, the director carves out the key role of Iago for himself and entrusts that of the “Moor” to Jawad Moraqib. The young and in love Desdemona is played by Ambrosia Caldarelli, Antonia Truppo plays the role of Emilia, Iago’s wife, Matteo Olivetti is Michele, Michael Schermi is Roderigo and Vittorio Viviani is the Dogge.

They are not what they are, the plot

The action begins in a prison, where an elderly man is taken out of his cell and escorted to the library. Here, waiting for him, there are a journalist and a video operator, ready to hold a long interview in which the man tells his violent past and all the details of the crime that sentenced him to prison. The man then begins to retrace those days, fatal for him, 20 years earlier, when he was part of a criminal association in the capital dedicated to usury, drug dealing and so on. Iago, this is the name of the grim protagonist, is furious because his boss, Othello, has promoted another, a certain Michele, to a role of greater responsibility in his place.

From that moment Iago has no other objective than to take revenge and get the Moor out of the way to have the space he thinks he deserves. The opportunity to do so arrives when the boss sends Iago, Othello, their wives Desdemona and Emilia, and Michele, to oversee the drug trafficking on the coast, where their activity is threatened by the advance of the Turkish clans.

The group therefore finds itself far from the Roman base and from the watchful eyes of the organization, in an Anzio perpetually windswept and under a leaden sky, and it is in that context that Iago enacts his diabolical revenge, using the Othello’s love for his wife, and plotting and manipulating until he drives his rival mad with unmotivated jealousy and pushes him to destroy the whole meaning of his life.

They are not what they are, a successful experiment

On paper, the idea of ​​a version of Othello in Roman dialect, set in the world of crime, may seem like a senseless risk, an extreme attempt to ride the now rampant passion for crime, preferably as realistic as possible, and to the story of criminal street life, where Italian is an unknown code and only the language of blood is spoken. Instead, Edoardo Leo denies every fear and carries out a very ambitious but also quite successful operation, with a version of the tragedy of jealousy and possession that strips its form and brings out to the last drop all the ferocity of a story in which the Human pity, in most of the characters, does not exist.

In an off-season Anzio, emptied, with a cast-iron sky, in which the sea is perpetually agitated like the souls of the protagonists, the machinations of Iago who betrays, lies, maneuvers, manipulates everyone for his final purpose, are nourished and they grow in the shadow of an environment that lives in the darkness of the social context, and dig into the depths of souls without fear but also without peace. The only light in this perpetual night radiates from the two women: the naive Desdemona and the exploited Emilia, whose dedication to her friend becomes a weapon at the service of her husband’s diabolical plan.

The most successful thing about the film is its most daring idea: the estrangement caused by faithfully proposing Shakespeare’s tragedy, not only situation by situation, but also verse by verse, in a rough and angular dialect, light years away from the sound and lyricism of the bard’s language. A choice that strips away that immortal text, bringing out all its ferocity, while events reach their climax and Othello’s madness explodes, demonstrating the drift and tragedies to which a toxic love understood as possession leads, which easily turns into damnation . A daring experiment, but one that succeeded better than one might expect.

Rating: 6.5