As Sonny might have sang if Coppola’s The Godfather was a musical – “Bippety-Bella-Bing!”
As a classic and well-told fairy tale in countless film and television adaptations, amongst the most recent being the Lily James Disney release, film-makers will always return to the most reliable source of literature upon which to build a great vision. Cinderella will continue to be one such point of reference, as it constantly and continually renews itself for the next generation of children and their families.
With no fewer than four directors attached here, Cinderella The Cat received a screening at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, following a successful Venice Film Festival bow last year and an Italian cinema release. However, please be advised that although this follows the standard familiar steps of a fairy tale, this is not one for the children, given that it uses gangsters, drugs and a manipulative matriarch with six children already – not to mention a little bit of profanity, sexual suggestion and violence.
Vittorio Basile is a magnate who has plans to give the Bay of Naples a wondrous future with various projects to create jobs and prosperity – the centrepiece of which is an amazing hologram-rich ship, the “Megaride”. His daughter, Mia, is watched over by bodyguard Gemilo, and Basile has plans to marry Angelica, the glamorous mother of five daughters and one effeminate son. However, her gangster lover Salvatore is using the marriage as a ruse to get their hands on the immense Basile fortune, which he demonstrates by shooting Vittorio in the period just after the marriage happens on the night.
Years later, the Megaride has become a dilapidated haven for sleaze, retitled “The Ace Of Clubs”. As per classic Cinderella fashion, Mia has become a slave to Angelica and her daughters, crawling around the air vents between cleaning up her step-sisters’ rooms, constantly being scolded for her illiteracy and appearance. However, salvation for Angelica is imminent with the reappearance in her life of Salvatore, who has been building his own illicit empire and vision for Naples, and the real possibility that she can finally be his bride, not to mention finally claiming the spoils of the Basile family…
Cinderella The Cat is one of the most imaginative renderings of a fairy-tale produced in recent years, and a movie that still surprises on occasion. The usual motifs of midnight and the shoe are here, but there are one or two little tweaks that make it more like a gangster classic, whilst keeping the dream-like mystique of any number of iconic stories that we have all grown up with.
The visual style is reminiscent of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape Of Water and, like the best of his work, uses familiar elements fused with a unique perspective of vision. There is a twinge of a non-PC reflection on ethnicity that belongs decades earlier, but perhaps the period in which the film is set allows that because of the historical sense of what this used to represent.
That is one minor gripe in a very pleasurable animated experience, and one hopes that Cinderella The Cat will find an outlet away from the festival circuit. Given a positive review from Variety post-Venice last year which alluded to an international release, there is a chance here.
CINDERELLA THE CAT / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: ALESSANDRO RAK, IVAN CAPPIELLO, MARINO GUARNIERI, DARIO SANSONE / SCREENPLAY: BARBARA CIARDO, ANNARITA CALLIGARIS, ANTONIA EMANUELA ANGRISANI / STARRING: MASSIMILIANO GALLO, MARIA PIA CALZONE, ALESSANDRO GASSMAN, MARIANO RIGILLO / RELEASE DATE: TBC
