There is a discordant note like the banging of cymbals in a lullaby in “Buen Camino”, Checco Zalone’s latest film directed by Gennaro Nunziante, in theaters at Christmas: a joke in bad taste, moreover, a joke in very bad taste in a film that promises to be nice, funny and oriented towards pure and genuine values (as with all the character’s previous films, think of Tolo Tolo). It can be found in the trailer, which is already visible on social media.
Entering a rather crowded, smelly and spartan hostel, like all hostels on the Camino de Santiago, the character Checco played by Zalone says to his daughter Cristal: “I feel like I’m in a movie”. “What movie?” the girl asks. And he replies: Schindler’s List. And there something squeaks like a crack on glass. He wants to make people laugh, but instead it gets stuck between his teeth like a bone. Because you can joke about everything, but not really everything-everything.
The reference to Spielberg’s masterpiece on the Holocaust, winner of 7 Oscars, is absolutely inappropriate, because nothing can be compared to the Jewish extermination. The uniqueness of the Holocaust is something absolute. Any comparison or reference with the death of six million people diminishes the event, and moves it away from that absolute and monstrous whirlpool of history into which humanity has fallen, as deniers or fascists often try to do. Every time that abyss is compared, a grain of horror is revealed. Comparing a hostel to the barracks of Birkenau is a moral sloppiness that we do not deserve. And that grain is an involuntary gift to deniers, revisionists, assorted nostalgics, always ready to push the pedal of undue equalization: the foibe here, the Shoah there, and so on with the blender of memory that equates everything and makes everything forgivable. Now, this is not the case. In all likelihood Zalone and Nunziante have their character say that line to highlight his ignorance, his clumsiness, his usual inability to be in the world. But even acted stupidity has its limits. There are wounds that cannot be scratched even by mistake, not even through naivety. It doesn’t just happen: the uniqueness of the Extermination cannot be compared to anything. Because certain words, if pronounced lightly, always end up weighing, even by just one gram. Always.
