A parallel world equal to ours, except for one thing, laughter, chases, explosions and a love story. There is all this in Il migliore dei mondi, the latest film starring Marcello Macchia, aka Maccio Capatonda, available for a couple of weeks on Amazon Prime Video. The film is directed by the same Macchia, who is also the author of the subject, along with Alessio Dogana and Danilo Carlani, with whom he has collaborated for years.
Capatonda’s third feature, according to critics, is his most successful so far: brilliant and fun without being just a set of sketches, with a solid plot and a good dose of action. With the arrival of the Christmas holidays those who have not yet seen it have no excuse. But if you need some more reason, here is a short list.
For the original initial idea
Imagine waking up one morning and to connect to the Internet you can rely only on a 56K modem and its unmistakable melody. Imagine also that you can’t use Alexa, social media, Tinder and the GPS navigator because all these things no longer exist. We are in 2023, but the technology stopped in 1999 because the much feared millennium bug at the stroke of 2000 there was really with harmful effects for the Earth and the consequent ban on technological progress. It is in a world like this that the protagonist of the film, Ennio Storto (Capatonda), an almost fifty year old who resorts to the help of technology in every part of his mediocre life, is catapulted because of a banal mistake.
It’s not a nostalgic movie
The film takes the protagonist back to a prehistoric time for technology and even if this gap in history will allow Ennio to grow in social relations, learn again to improvise and free himself from his cage made of smart apps and devices, Eventually it will be clear that the best of worlds is not even the one where it ended.
Despite the many references to the nineties, including Nokia 3310, phone booths and Blockbuster, Il migliore dei mondi is not a nostalgic work, indeed: pretend to embrace nostalgia, but what he puts on stage is a modern dystopia becoming the parody of a nostalgic film. The technological drift of the hyper-connected present is critical, but 2023 without technology represents a hopeless dictatorship.
Homage Back to the future
We’re talking about a science fiction film that in its own way deals with time travel and for this reason it could not fail to contain more or less explicit citations to Back to the Future, the famous film saga directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. If you’re a fan, you can try to catch them all.
Is full of cameo
In the film, apart from an extraordinary Pietro Sermonti (Stanis by Boris) among the co-stars along with the amazing Martina Gatti (Skam), in almost every scene there are cameos of actors, comedians or youtubers known - which sometimes are all three things together. For those who grew up in Italy in the 2000s, while technology progressed hand in hand, it will be fun and reassuring to meet among others Luca Vecchi of The Pills, Federica Cacciola alias Martina Dell'Ombra, the stand up comedian Stefano Rapone and Turbo Paolo, one of the latest comic phenomena brought to life by social networks.
Has something to say
All of them have become famous like Maccio thanks to new technologies, the network and the art of making do with all the tools and channels available. And maybe this is the message, if there is one, of the best of worlds, among many questions: a timid ode to the possibilities offered by technology, albeit in the "world full of bullshit in which we live" and of which we seem enthusiastic.
Illustration by Gloria Dozio - Acrimònia Studios
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