An Italian quintet of films spearheaded by the 'grand return' of cult director and former Cannes winner Nanni Moretti will offer up helpings of love, ghosts and horror as they compete for the Golden Lion at this year's Venice Film Festival on September 2-12.

    The 83rd edition of the fest will see the return after 37 years of 'prodigal son' Moretti, who is in competition with "Succederà questa notte" (It Will Happen Tonight).

Joining him in the running for the Golden Lion are four other Italians: Marco Bechis with "Ritorno a Buenos Aires" (Return to Buenois Aires); Edoardo De Angelis with "Il fuoco che ti porta dentro" (The Fire You Carry Inside); Andrea Pallaoro with "The Echo Chamber"; and Paolo Strippoli with "L'estranea" (The Stranger). The total of five Italian films in competition is broadly in line with previous editions.
    To these are added, to mention only the out-of-competition selection, three other auteur films: Tuscan auteur Giovanni Veronesi's "Dio Ride" (God Laughs), veteran auteur Gianni Amelio's "Nessun Dolore" (No Pain), and Neapolitan auteur Mario Martone's "Scherzetto." Moretti is back after the controversial 1989 exclusion of "Palombella Rossa" (Red Wood Pigeon), which merged a bitter reflection on the demise of Italian Communism and the sport of water polo..
    This time, the Roman director, far removed from any political dimension, brings to the Lido a film, "Succederà questa notte," freely adapted from several short stories by Eshkol Nevo from the collection "Legami" (Ties Tha Bind).
    The film's heart is the relationship between Greta and Matteo, played by Jasmine Trinca and Louis Garrel: two people who keep meeting at the wrong time.
    Also in the running for Italy is another film about love and excess that shares, among other things, with Moretti's film, its selection at the upcoming Toronto Film Festival: Pallaoro's "The Echo Chamber," based on the great Bernardo Bertolucci's last, unproduced screenplay.
    An apartment film and at the same time a "ghost story," as Bertolucci himself envisioned it, with Leo (Luca Marinelli), a troubled music producer, cocaine addict and unresolved artist, and Anne (Alicia Vikander), a young physiotherapist who heals his back and, with her love, also his anguish.
    Finally, there's Ava (Susan Sarandon), a huge songwriting star who frequents the apartment for her unexpected final album.
    Then there's Bechis with "Return to Buenos Aires," which brings us back, thirty years later, to the bloody story of "Garage Olimpo." The protagonist is a former internee (Adriano Giannini) who is summoned to the Argentine capital "to testify at the trial against the former soldiers who kidnapped, tortured, and enslaved him during the military dictatorship." It's a journey back to a past filled with nightmares experienced and to be relived.
    In "The Fire You Carry Inside" by Edoardo De Angelis, based on the novel of the same name by Antonio Franchino, we find ourselves in a 3.0 version of the "Christmas at the Cupiellos", the famous 1931 tragicomic stage play by great Neapolitan playwright Eduardo De Filippo.
    It's set in the bourgeois Milanese home of Antonio (Lino Musella), a politically correct editor.
    Here, his mother, Vanessa Scalera, arrives, strikingly embodying "the portrait, both ruthless and comical, of a possessive and hostile mother, a distillation of the Neapolitan essence from which her children had sought to escape by emigrating north" (in the words of the exhibition's artistic director, Alberto Barbera).
    Finally, there's thirty-three-year-old Paolo Strippoli with "The Stranger," a soft horror film starring a mother (Jasmine Trinca) who reveals to her daughter (Romana Maggiora Vergano) that she knows nothing about her family because behind all their affairs is a woman, the titular "The Stranger," who is none other than Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, with just the right amount of devilish charm.
    It's a soft horror film without special effects that proves one thing once again: in reality, in everyday life, there's often a horror component without special effects, worthy of the great classics of the genre.
   

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