Have you ever been in a bind where you needed two signatures on a document to get by, and you were the only person in the room? If so, then you may have firsthand experience that forgery, or attempted forgery, can be something of a lark, something of a game.
And, of course, it became a game with consequences. In “The Big Fake,” a new fiction film directed by Stefano Lodovichi from a script by Lorenzo Bagnotori and Sandro Petraglia, an aspiring artist named Toni, who has generous flowing black hair and beard and piercing blue eyes (he’s played by Pietro Castellitto), discovers that he can duplicate a Modigliani painting perfectly, right down to the signature. It soon follows that there’s money in it. There’s also money to be made forging signatures on large checks.
This is amusing to Toni, who also just enjoys hanging out with the criminal element for fun. He acquires a lovely, affectionate girlfriend who gets almost as much of a kick out of Toni’s particular talent as he initially does. The movie begins when Toni is innocent, hanging out with his provincial best friends, “a priest and a worker,” as he calls them, in a pastoral setting. They then embark to Rome to seek their fortunes, unable to even conceive of the catastrophes that await them. (The soundtrack accompanies them with Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” one of several admittedly first-rate needle drops served up by the film.)
Some of these catastrophes are historical and political in nature. The kidnapping of the Italian politician Aldo Moro becomes central to Toni’s story. He’s contacted by representatives of a faction that’s pushing misinformation. They ask him to forge some propaganda from the Red Brigade, the organization claiming to be behind Moro’s abduction. Are you Red or Black, Toni is asked. “I don’t give a f**k about colors. I’m for whoever helps me live well.“
That attitude is his design for living, and it never occurs to him just how much he is playing with fire in this situation. Early in the movie, Toni’s priest friend, Vittorio, utters the Latin phrase “Tertium non datur,” meaning there’s no third option. Certain circumstances are just one way or another. Life, or death, for instance. The stakes are higher by the end of the movie, when Toni’s girlfriend Donata (Aurora Giovinazzo) is pregnant with the couple’s child.
The hair-raising narrative content notwithstanding, the movie doesn’t create much emotional traction. Not because Toni is difficult to like, although he certainly is. It’s more that it’s difficult to feel anything about him, even after he completes an ingenious heist that he intends as a kind of conceptual art piece. He sells out almost everyone around him, but he’s also such a, well, worm that you start to believe that it’s their bad judgment that got them in bed with him (so to speak) in the first place. And so, once you’ve completed your cinematic acquaintance with Toni, you only want to shrug the guy off. Maybe even take a shower or something.
