Plan 17

This year's Italian Film Festival comes with 2 separate Fringe Programmes, the first being the "Gialli" - Thriller series, and the second meant for fans of animation. Best part of all for everyone tightening our belts these days, is that the screenings are absolutely free. Plan 17 played to a full house today at The Arts House Screening Room, and while it was far from perfect, it was still a lot of fun watching it with a very responsive audience.

The premise of Plan 17 is nothing short of intriguing for fans of the thriller genre. We have a bomber who's tasked to enter a building and detonate a briefcase bomb. Why he does so and his motivations aren't immediately clear, and the situation is made all the more complex when 2 seemingly unrelated persons join him in a lift, and finds themselves all stuck when the lift motor got tampered with. Worse, the bomb is already set on a timer, and it's a 90 minute rush to get themselves out.

No, the film didn't spend the bulk of the narrative confined in that tiny space and having three persons talk crap while waiting for the rescue team. At this stage, the non-linear narrative kicks in to provide some spatial allowance to break out of the four walls, and had attempted to tell the audience more about each individual's background, and how they all are actually connected to one another through 6 (or less) degrees of separation. There's Meroni (Giuseppe Soleri) who's the meek working class salaryman who's taken advantaged of constantly, and the office slut in Violetta (Elisabetta Rocchetti).

The bulk of the film, and its chief anti-hero, is Marco Mancini (Giampaolo Morelli), the bomber who made a pact with someone to retrieve some documents, but finding himself stuck in a time-crisis. There's an enormous back story on his involvement in a crime family, a bank robbery gone awry, and double-crossings from jealous rivals, which the ending of the film provided just that little twist to it all to try and justify some cold-blooded execution. At some point you would want to yell out "enough!" to the filmmaker for having to rewind certain scenes just to point out to you explicitly how things gelled together.

It's hardly a perfect film though, if one is expecting a very tight paced thriller. Plot loopholes are abound, and some situations may be a tad absurd, drawing unintentional laughter, and dialogue that's cringeworthy as well. Technically this looked like it was shot on video and lacked some cinematic quality to it, though there's a highly infectious theme/trance music that played just about at every important scene or revelation. Sad to say though the last third of the film became highly predictable and decided to become an action movie, with a weak villain revealed who enjoys that standard-villain-soliloquy delivery all over again.

Plan 17 may not be the wonderful introduction to Italian Gialli for me, but my interest is piqued for the remaining offerings over the next two days.

"Piano 17" is the last movie written and directed by Antonio and Marco Manetti (a.k.a. Manetti Bros.), two very promising directors of Italian cinema.

They shot it with only 65,000 € (about 82,000 $) but the result is unquestionable.

The protagonist of the movie are four robbers who try to rob a bank, but during the robbery, a security guard shoots at one of the robbers: it's Matteo Mancini. They've lose the money they'd robbed. Now they have to put a bomb in an office; so Matteo's brother takes the elevator and goes up towards the 17th floor. With him there are also an unprejudiced secretary and a clumsy employee. When the elevator is going to reach the floor it stops. Now they're trapped in the elevator and they can't go out. But the worse thing is that the bomb is going to blow up. They've only one hour and half to go out. Mancini tries to inform Pittana and Borgia (his parties), but especially Pittana seems he doesn't want to save his friend.

The ending is quite predictable, but the rest of the movie is very good. There are also some flashbacks that explain what have happened before.

Good actors, good direction, good screenplay.

"Piano 17" is an extraordinary achievement first, then a good action movie: shot on HDV on a shoestring budget of € 65,000 (that should convert to around $ 71.000, these days), it is a highly entertaining thriller taking place around three people stuck in an elevator with a ticking bomb.

Although some of the premises are absurd (but not at all more absurd than - say - those behind such previous blockbusters as Jan DeBont's "Speed"), the script and the direction do manage to keep the plot going at pace fast enough to prevent you from asking too many questions.

There are moments where you wish the film to be even better - it takes a little while to get the story really spinning and there's just a couple of dialogs that overstay their welcome a little bit. But all in all the film works very well building up to a nail biting climax.

The transfer to 35mm for projection cannot completely hide the fact the film was shot on digital - but otherwise the production values are first level. It will probably play much better on DVD or video than it does in a theater - but as it is it does hold up much better than most of the films shot on video that I happened to see around.

It should be seen by anyone who can enjoy a thriller, but it is definitely a must for anyone planning to direct: it is a lesson on humility, craft and will. And very entertaining to boot. If I were a foreign distributor (hint! hint!) I'd snatch it up in a second.