‘Enea’ Review: Pietro Castellitto Takes a Superficially Slick, Unfocused Snapshot of Superficially Slick, Unfocused Roman Rich Kids
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Your staying power with Pietro Castellitto’s genre-adjacent non-thriller Enea will depend on your appetite for well-heeled Romans blathering on tirelessly about the encroaching emptiness inside them. An overlong, windy film that purports to investigate the hypocrisy, shallowness and moral decay of wealthy Italians but feels too embedded in that world to have much bite, this is a soulless bit of self-indulgence that seems far too pleased with itself. It’s full of flashy technique and ostentatious stylistic flourishes but has almost nothing of note to say about the supposed burdens of privilege.
The writer-director-lead actor’s father, Sergio Castellitto, among his many screen credits starred for three seasons in the psychotherapist role on the Italian version of In Treatment. That provides a winking in-joke for domestic audiences in his casting here as another shrink, Celeste, the title character’s despondent father, who generally has his head too deep in books to look at life. Neither Celeste nor this film provide much psychological insight into Enea as an individual or as a representation of his generation and class; nor do they illuminate the portrait of Rome as a city devouring itself.
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Often, the virtuoso set-pieces, the whirl of coke-fueled parties and wild dance-club nights, the underlying listlessness and melancholy, not to mention the abrasive protagonist free-floating in his own hedonistic ennui, recall Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty. But there was purpose, control and meaning behind that director’s taste for extravagant excess. Besides, if Sorrentino was already riffing on Fellini, that makes Castellitto emulating Sorrentino thirdhand and thematically anemic.
The film opens with 30-year-old Enea and his best friend Valentino (Giorgio Quarzo Guarisco) talking with Enea’s TV presenter mother Marina (Chiara Noschese) about broken people with an uncertain future ahead of them. Enea proposes a toast to “the clan,” to the value of family, biological or chosen, but that seems a glib sentiment coming from a protagonist — and correspondingly, a performance — so wrapped up in himself.
Nominally inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid, the film hops about following Enea in his beau monde pursuits, from the tennis club to the blackjack table to the stylish sushi restaurant he manages, where the Japanese chef has raised eyebrows by getting caught shtupping the seafood. The difficulty of finding reliable help is a sardonic motif, as the family’s maid has returned to the Philippines to their consternation, and the only replacement they can get is believed to have murdered his aristocratic former boss.
The chaotic opening act also includes the first solo flight in a two-seater plane of newly licensed pilot Valentino, who appears to have a romantic fixation with Enea. He expresses this and whatever else is on his mind in karaoke, doing the syrupy Renato Zero song “Spiagge” whenever he gets the chance. Which is too often. Enea is more interested in the lovely Eva (Benedetta Porcaroli), even if the movie is not. She’s mainly required to smile luminously while he says things like “Beautiful girls make life better.”
No one in the family seems terribly grounded. Celeste regularly checks into a luxury hotel catering to very specific guest needs, releasing his rage in an expensive variation on primal-scream therapy; his teenage son Brenno (the director’s brother Cesare Castellitto) is in trouble at school after getting into a fight with a kid who called Enea a drug-dealer; and Marina’s illusion of happiness and serenity is revealed to be delusion when her yoga hour is interrupted by a palm tree crashing through their glass sunroom.
But this is the kind of movie where you’re more likely to wonder how much that scene cost than ponder its sledgehammer visual metaphor for fragile existence. I lost count of the number of times in two hours that I asked myself what Enea was about and where it was going.
The drug rumors concerning Enea might be true on a small-time level, which yields the closest thing to a plot when gangster Giordano (Adamo Dionisi) taps him and Valentino to move a massive cocaine shipment. Starved for something to make them feel alive, they sign on. And acclaimed author Oreste Dicembre (Giorgio Montanini), a guest on Marina’s TV show, whose son happens to be the one scuffling with Brenno, turns out to have his own underworld dealings, putting a target on Enea and Valentino’s backs.
In his ambitious second feature (following 2020’s The Predators), the director shows such self-conscious disdain for the building blocks of conventional narrative that nothing coheres. The movie is choppy, uninvolving and thematically wishy-washy, giving you very little reason to care about its numbingly verbose characters even when their lives are under threat.
The best thing Enea has going for it is the razor-sharp, propulsive visuals of cinematographer Radek Ladczuk, who shot Jennifer Kent’s films The Babadook and The Nightingale. But that’s not enough to lighten the heaviness of a such a big, splashy movie when it’s ultimately hollower than the people it depicts. Echoing the milieu, a lot of money appears to have been thrown at this production; if only someone knew how to spend it.
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