Changing Destiny

Another award winner, another puzzling disappointment. Daniele Gaglianone won the Tiger at Rotterdam with the film Changing Destiny (Nemmeno il Destino) this year. It is blinding, dazzling, and psychologically complex in the sleep inducing sense. The music and camera works are so energetically pointless that it may appear to some as innovative and powerful. It would have been so if the story were successful; unfortunately, it is not. To use the story of one to represent a group is a common narrative method; even so, it works only if we, the audience, are convinced that the others in the group share the more or less the same story we are told. In this film, this is hardly so. Ferdi’s alcoholic father, we are told, is the only worker that had not died from cancer from their old contaminated plant. So, Ferdi’s difficulties with his father are more an exception than the norm. Alessandro too has a mother who was a ward of the church who was given over to a brutal man for marriage. There is no mention of other people like her. So, instead of a film that talks about the destruction of a society and its members, it is a few randomly put together hard-knock stories that do not make any cohesive points. Not only are the main characters juveniles, so too is the skill of the filmmaker.