Let’s hope there was a giant extractor fan on the set of “The Fire Within You,” because the stench of burnt oil must have been overwhelming. It’s not only food that gets blistered in Edoardo De Angelis’ overwrought screaming match, which makes one envious of the wax Odysseus had handy to plug up his sailors’ ears. In his case, the sounds were of sirens, whereas the characters here would give the harpies a run for their money, making them seem almost dulcet-toned in comparison. Set in a family’s apartment on Christmas Eve and featuring a mother so monstrous not even the Ancient Greeks could have conjured her up, one can only imagine what kind of pressure was on the Venice Film Festival to place it in competition.
“La mamma è sempre la mamma” is a common Italian expression — “the mother is always the mother” — and her sacred position in the nation’s psyche, tied of course to a couple of millennia spent worshiping the Virgin Mary, renders her an inviolable figure. No matter how nasty she may be, no matter how unfit she is to be a mother, her position is untouchable. For Italian audiences, that means Angela (Vanessa Scalera) can spew bile nonstop, but there’s no question her children will stick by her. For most everyone else, it’s impossible to escape the thought that if they’ve put up with this termagant for so many years, they deserve every moment together. But why drag us into it?
Angela’s clearly already had a tipple in the kitchen when she excoriates her adult son Antonio (Lino Musella) for not having the guts to slit a live capon’s throat. With a cigarette dangling from her lips, ashes and curse words ever ready to fall, Angela lurches around the house critical of everything and everyone. She pours venom on Antonio, a successful literary editor, telling him he’s a useless wimp. Her daughter-in-law Benedetta (Elena Radonicich) is dismissed for not knowing her way around a stove top and, what’s worse, she’s the reason why Neapolitan-raised Antonio lives in Milan. Grandson Andrea (Samuele Mazza) is a “faggot” because he takes ballet classes, and granddaughter Valentina (Nicole Malaj) is a vegetarian, which makes her pathetic.
Her cooking is as poisonous as her words, yet both gush out in a non-stop flow of over-fried eggplant, aggressively hacked cod and salad drowning in oil. With the arrival of Angela’s daughter Paola (Ivana Lotito), the nastiness increases — at least Paola has the ability to talk back, unlike Antonio, who keeps taking abuse, such as “it would have been better if you had died at birth,” until he finally explodes, accompanied by a burst of shattered glass.
It’s all so tediously predictable, shot with unsteady camera movements as if the tensions inside the sole location needed visual reinforcement. Because the plot required an outsider to expose more of the family’s history of dysfunctionality, an uninvited guest arrives in the form of Giulio (Tommaso Ragno), a writer who’ll be collaborating with Antonio on his next novel. An increasingly drunk Angela gets all flirty, alternating suggestive glances with a barrage of pointed insults designed to inflict maximum damage at everyone around her and then, with a plot twist that could be seen a mile off, new information arrives designed to elicit sympathy from this harridan’s children as well as the audience. La mamma è sempre la mamma.
It’s a thankless role for Vanessa Scalera, pushed to extremes and forced to embody a woman whose one trait is bitterness; the script, based on a novel by Antonio Franchini, doesn’t even attempt to give her motivation. Angela takes up so much space there’s barely room for anything other than caricature, such as Paola’s laughable Buddhist husband Edoardo (Tony Laudadio), or Andrea, initially given some personality but then seen ludicrously performing ballet moves in the apartment — like Ann Miller in “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” only that film was a comedy.
Perhaps some Italians will find Neapolitan Angela’s constant harping about Milan humorous, though far more amusing is how the film tries to pass off Antonio’s apartment as a Milan location, when everything about it (confirmed by the closing credits) says Naples. On top of it all, De Angelis (“The Vice of Hope”) decided the screaming matches needed a musical accompaniment of equal force. Between the noxious taunts, bubbling grease and cigarettes stubbed out in pasta, it’s enough to give anyone indigestion.
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