COMPETITION Gigi’s life doesn’t differ much from day to day, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a routine full of delight. This, however, is shaken when events with a bitter, sinister aftertaste begin to taint the charming landscape. Two suicides, a police investigation and the occasional burst into song show a pleasant community with one foot between reality and fantasy.
In this playful and luminous film, Alessandro Comodin follows Gigi, a rural policeman who controls traffic in a small village in northern Italy and who is also the director’s uncle.
The film constructs a device that allows its protagonist to unfold widely, joyfully and generously, sharing from the most concrete and routine of his life to the most fantastic and imaginary. For a large part of the film, the spectator enters as a third party in his patrol car, enjoying the conversation between the filmic device and Gigi’s deeply fabulous and inventive verbiage, which always keeps us between bewilderment and seduction.
Gigi la legge thus functions as a portrait of life in a small town that goes beyond the commonplaces and laconicism and opens up to all its little wonders and mysteries, however disturbing and macabre they may be. (Vanja Milena)
