The well-known Italian filmmaker Paolo Virzi (Human Capital, The First Beautiful Thing, Like Crazy) presented a mediocre post-apocalyptic, dystopian comedy drama set in the Rome of the near future in the accompanying program of the Venice festival. And it’s not a bright future at all, since it hasn’t rained in Rome for three years, and water supplies are running low. The situation is so catastrophic that the river Tiber has completely dried up and its bed is now a real desert, and for almost a year people have been given daily supplies of water. Residents are furious, they protest against such policies and austerity measures, all the more so because we see that there are resorts where water is not saved at all, but the rich continue to waste it. Rome seems to be turning into Africa here, because some tropical diseases that are not typical for Europe are starting to spread there, and the whole city is on the verge of boiling over.
And in a somewhat Altman style, Virzi brings us a story about several seemingly unrelated characters whose paths will meet in some way, but it was still too thin and the characters mostly remained uninteresting for “Siccita” to be able to fit in the same sentence with masterpieces as the most famous representatives of this type of film such as “Short Cuts” or “Nashville”. Virzi assembled a first-class cast, so at first it seemed that “Drought” could be a kind of Italian answer to the well-known American satire “Don’t Look Up”, because it is obvious that the lack of water and drought here are also symbols for climate change, including the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown that inspired Virzi.
That gallery of characters features an old man (Silvio Orlando) who has served more than 20 years for murdering a woman and is out of prison trying to find his daughter. There is also a taxi driver (Valerio Mastandrea) who is constantly lethargic and sleeps as if bitten by a tsetse fly, as well as the head of the hospital (Claudia Pandolfi) who will indeed discover that some new, atypical disease is spreading through the city. Her husband (Vinicio Marchioni) is constantly corresponding with an old love, and her husband, an unemployed theater actor (Tommaso Ragno), has become an influencer and internet star. An expert in hydrology (Diego Ribon) will soon become a big TV star, and upon his arrival in Rome, he will be placed in a luxury resort whose rich owners clearly do not think about savings, which is why protesters are raging in front of their hotel, and soon he will meet no less, no more than Monica Bellucci, who is playing herself.
There are still a lot of characters and all of them will somehow be connected or we will understand that they were somehow connected before, and their destinies will intertwine again. So even though the idea was interesting and even Virzi skillfully interweaves some of those stories with his screenwriters, there are too many dead ends and a lot of characters that are actually unnecessary and if they weren’t there, the story wouldn’t suffer much. Moreover, it would probably be more focused and tougher, and this way in the end it seems quite rushed, resolved by force and in some parts completely illogical. All the same, it’s a well-paced film with a quality cast and superb special effects, and I’m especially referring to the scenes where we see the dried-up bed of the Tiber. It’s a pity that in the end, more was not extracted from this story, which even has a solid balance of comedy and drama, even though there was definitely potential.