Directing Happiness

Carlo Mazzacurati's (apparently final) film: 'La Sedia della Felicita' or loosely translated: 'The Chair of Happiness' is a really delightful take on both daily human interactions and foibles as well as a deeper exploration of the meaning of taking the director's seat and finding happiness or the treasure of this career line within the journey of directing itself.

It is a look at how a director's passion for his work can bring him the ultimate happiness. This is the director's very clever and subtle way of seeing this profession with all it's ups and downs not just as an end result of successful completion but as a powerful tool of discovery. Herein lies the happiness; it is in the joy of the journey, in the adventure along the way, rather than just in the end result.

The story is simply told about a tattoo artist and a manicurist fated to meet and to look for a hidden treasure in an artistic looking chair. There lies the metaphor of finding happiness in the director's chair.

The characters are all very artistically sculpted; the story in fact unfolds very quickly at times but with very clever emotional shifts within the characters themselves as well as in their interactions with one another. The shifts maybe fast and furious but they are very believable, making the characters both real as well as fictional because of the quick pace of the film.
The only slow part was towards the end where we feel that it no longer matters because we now know the characters really well.

This film is one of the most intricate exposition of mixed versatile characters that I have seen (in a film of one and a half hours) in a very long time.
European films are notorious for their twisting plots and strong story lines as well as their powerful characters and this does not vary much from that particular formula except in how detailed the characters are drawn out for us in such a short period of 'filmic' time.

Exceptional character development throughout:  from the fiery sweet and slightly clumsy manicurist to the caring both clever and clueless tattooist, to the freaky mountaineers, to the complex greedy priest, to the weird slightly believable fortune teller, even to the secondary characters surrounding the main ones, all of these characters are so thought out and well exposed that one wonders at whether these could in fact be real people in the director's life.

The humour in the film is both ironic and superbly inserted at the right times and places, including comic caricatures of certain strange personalities who add a lot of charm to the film.
Even animals were given intelligent 'lines' in the movie and given certain expressions or reactions mirroring our own as an audience (watch out for the bear in one of the last scenes: a superb insertion for comic value, as well as emphasising the irony of life and it's unexpected turns).

The shots are mostly close ups and mid range shots to work out the characters' motivations and relationships for us as an audience. Two very close up shots come hand in hand with one tragic but comical moment towards the end. The event is followed by a shot of the tattoo artist (main character) facing the camera straight on -looking at the audience in fact- as if to say these things happen in real life even if this is fiction. This tragic comic scene is also followed by a close up of the statue of a Madonna in church, and this perhaps is Carlo's own take on the many faces of religion.

The theme of religion is in fact one of the themes he explores, exposing it as a double edged knife; both as compassionate belief and as a tool for control. It is perceived by him as dependent on human motivations.The priest is a very interesting character embodying the above duality

The choice of characters as artists with artists' tools and their versatile purpose is part of the theme of Art as a happy world where human beings can adapt their crafts and learn and develop as well as find happiness in the process of creative art itself.

This theme is directly linked to Carlo's metaphor of the director's chair in the movie. He sees perhaps his own happiness as coming into being through the artistic process of directing and creating a fictional world with the tools of an artist.

The chair in the film (where the treasure is hidden) in fact becomes the treasure itself as its value is in the journey the characters take and what they discover about each other trying to find the chairs.
They find their own feelings and touch other people's lives along the way.(See the scene with the Chinese boy as a direct example of this). Even the flower seller (exaggerated on purpose as a caricature of an Indian native) is projected as part of the happy process of directive creation. The character caricatures drawn for us are part of the director's artistic process.

Carlo does not try to mask his craft; he exaggerates the characters on purpose with humour and costumes and colours to share with us his secret treasure: that of the joy found in ones true artistic calling in life.

The props such as costumes, a crown and jewels, as well as flowers in a cemetery and the guns at one point in the film, are there only as reminders that these objects are fluid images, they don't determine the characters or the outcome of their journey and that the outcome in fact does not matter as much as the road followed and the discoveries made along the way.

The magician scene with the twisting turning chair comes in too as a reinforcing agent to the idea that directing is similar in fact to painting and drawing and magic, it is like any other artistic profession and is sometimes uncontrollable and random.

The chair also takes part in other scenes as an actual chair for resting as well as a chair in odd places, hardly fitting or being torn apart and reconstructed or re-sewn together and used and pursued by all types of characters.

This is the director's mainstream message throughout the film: directing or Art generally doesn't come easy, it takes us to places where we have to improvise, change, fit, fix, rethink, break the rules and remake them but ultimately we find the funny in that because what matters is that we love what we do, we love creating and that is the end result rather than the work of art or metaphorically speaking 'the painting' itself.

Coming back for a moment to using intelligent animal cut outs for expressing or mirroring the audience's reactions or feelings to the scenes (and in fact to many potentially similar real life situations), try to spot the other animal scene (not the boars) where an inanimate shot of a fish somehow manages to portray our feelings about a particular scene. Unbelievably crafty shot which exudes emotion although the shot is of a still dead fish and this still image manages to unite the whole audience in the irony of a situation and the humour in it.

The 'chair' of happiness is a work of art in itself in many ways.
I highly recommend watching it and if you do, try to find the subtlety in how 'Felicita' is associated with a director's lot. Despite his struggles to create a film along the way, he finds happiness in his work as a director.

Take a happy seat and watch the movie.