Completed - ITALIAN - Drama - 86 minutes
The after dinner chat between a banker and his friend. The overwhelming power of the money that turns a true anarchist into a true financier.
Year of production : 2018 Director(s) : Giulio BASE
A penetrating portrait of a successful banker defending the position that his acquisition of wealth represents the practical corollary of anarchism. At first blush, the banker's case strikes as bizarre, yet the flaws in his reasoning are hard to pinpoint. The story rethinks the presuppositions of modernity: the way of life of the wealthy financier is indeed the logical culmination of today's project of human liberation. "The Anarchist Banker" is an autobiographical account of a person's core beliefs, interspersed by a number of questions from his conversational partner. Unlike many of the Platonic dialogues, the setting of the discussion is not laid out with any detail. One can only determine that the two protagonists are sitting at a table having just finished dinner. By conveying so bare a picture of the setting, the movie establishes a very abstract and cerebral atmosphere. That the act of eating is in the past and never reoccurs throughout the discussion only serves to reinforce the incorporeal feel, the completed meal at most reminding us that the realization of material necessities is the precondition of thought. This conversation promises to be as much of a mental event as the embodied condition of humanity can allow. Even the most noticeable physical element, the banker's various gestures with a cigar, reinforces the purely intellectual scene in view of the widespread notion that smoking aids memory and mental concentration. Adding to the thinness of the context is that the plot never tells us the names of the two interlocutors. One of them, the narrator of the conversation, is "me" or "I", whereas the main character is simply denoted as "the banker". The tension becomes more pronounced as the story proceeds. The claim that society's hold over human beings runs deep down to the core of the thinking and the talking: the uncompromising individualism embraced by the banker in maintaining that a single person, if sufficiently intelligent and stubborn, can transcend the politico-economic framework that conditions his or her existence.
Country(ies) : ITALY
Venice - Biennale 2018 (Persefone Award-best adapted screenplay)