Search Film, Company, People...

BAR MALFÉ

By Alessandro ABBA LEGNAZZI, Matteo TORTONE, Enrico GIOVANNONE

Drama - Post-Production 2018

Bar Malfé is an underground cave. A shelter for precarious, residual existences. Above lies the city, estranged. Next to the river and its ominous water. Waiting for what it's bound to happen.

- Year of production
- 2018
- Genres
- Drama
- Countries
- ITALY
- Budget
- 1 - 3 M$
- Duration
- 75 mn
- Director(s)
- Alessandro ABBA LEGNAZZI, Matteo TORTONE, Enrico GIOVANNONE
- Producer(s)
- Alessandro ABBA LEGNAZZI (MALFÉ FILM), Enrico GIOVANNONE (MALFÉ FILM), Matteo TORTONE (MALFÉ FILM)
- Synopsis
- All the usual patrons are gathered for the wake of the bar owner: dark suits and very few words. Left running the business are Stefano the bar-back and Ignazio, graduated from casual customer to crucial presence in the bar. The clients are always the same. Gloria, sixty-years old, once a messenger during Solidarnosc and now married to a communist activist, is dealing with her new role as an aunt. She smokes a lot. In front of her is a half-empty glass of whiskey. Sitting at the bar we find Paola and Enrico, a couple in their thirties. In their eyes that never meet there's a resigned love, while sitting on the stools, drinking their beers.
  Francesco sits in the same spot, always the same. Once a major league soccer player, he's a now a policeman. He's responsible for conducting the investigation of a missing little girl. His face looks tired, exhausted.
  The everyday life of the bar is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of Alice, the owner's thirty-five years old daughter and only heiress. She wants to sell the bar, so to immediately sever any bond with her father. This event forces the characters to face the new reality: it's the end of an era. In addition, the structural issues of the building are getting worse and worse everyday. It starts raining. Something begins to creak, to leak and to give up.
  Ignazio seems the only one who can sense the situation. Looking at it through the lens of theoretical physics, while he wanders around. When the width of two systems starts thinning inside and out, showing flaws, it begins to interact with the transforming space around it, eventually transforming itself.
  Stefano instead acts like nothing is happening: he puts his apron on and pours drinks, like always. He only knows that his home and his only possessions are here.
  The relationship between Enrico and Paola is getting more and more empty, showing their inability of mutual understanding, to a point where it's completely running out.
  As affection and humanity are gradually vanishing, Gloria becomes Paola's guidance. A mirror in which she can measure her own solitude and its inexorability. But with serene acceptance. Francesco shows instead a merciless but clear perception of the human nature: the world is mean. That little girl, dead or alive, won't change the state of things. Tomorrow there will be another one, again and again and again.
  Meanwhile Alice is forcing Stefano to face his responsibilities, the accounts in disarray and the debts her father piled up in the course of the years. After a stormy night spent trying to help a confused, drenched old man, an act driven more from habit than kindness, Stefano disappears, no longer able to deal with the situation. At last, while the news of the girl having been found comes in, Alice announces to have sold the bar. It's now empty. Ignazio is the only one left to guard it, appalled by the violence of the world outside, waiting for what is bound to happen.