(Venice Luigi Noera with the kind collaboration of Marina fearful and Annamaria Stramondo- Photos are published courtesy of ASAC Biennale)

Olivier Assayas offers us a detached view of the facts brought on stage

Presented in competition at the 76th Venice Film Festival in Venice, Wasp Network is the latest effort by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas.

Set in a Cuba of the nineties, Wasp Network (based on a story that really happened) vede protagonista René Gonzalez (played by Edgar Ramirez), esteemed Cuban airline pilot who decides to desert - abandoning his wife (Penelope Cruz) and daughter - to travel to Miami and collaborate with a group of other Cuban dissidents, with the aim of destabilizing the Fidel Castro regime.

Leaving for a moment, therefore, a still welcome trend from the yellow veins (psychological and not) or the unmistakable footprint of cinema across the Alps, Assayas has moved temporarily to the other side of the ocean to stage an important chapter of the past decades without forgetting the human component, with a successful focus on each of the activists and their private lives. And perhaps this is precisely the factor that most differentiates a product like Wasp Network from the countless works of the kind in which the issues concerning national and international politics are almost exclusively put in the spotlight.

And if the thing in itself seems to work overall it is mainly thanks to an iron screenplay (in this, admittedly, Assayas has always been a master) who does not fear frequent space-time jumps in which flashbacks are very frequent, but that, however, they are never so excessive that they are free or confusing to the viewer. If we add to all this also a good characterization of the characters, a direction (need to say?) clean and free of frills and a good narrative trend, here are all the ingredients for a job well done. In short words, a pack (quasi) perfect. Too much? Definitely yes.

Despite, indeed, the overall success of the entire feature film, at the end of the vision Wasp Network does not fully satisfy. Fault, most likely, of a directorial approach not yet accustomed to relating to such stories, fault, perhaps, of an excessive detachment by the director himself in staging the events mentioned above, even more likely, blame the fact that the audience, usually, he is led to expect much, much more from Assayas. Nostalgia, therefore, for that cinema that made it great it makes itself feel palpable and, more than anything else, one has the impression of being faced with almost impersonal work, decidedly sterile, in which the detachment with which the facts are staged is undoubtedly the major flaw.

marina fears