In rural Veneto, two drinking buddies chase the legend of a treasure hidden by their partner, Genio. A young architect in search of himself accompanies them.
"Le città di pianura" (Cities of the Plain) is the second film by director and screenwriter (here with Adriano Candiago) Francesco Sossai: a loose-knit road movie starring two unlikely protagonists in their fifties who long for the 1990s, in a Veneto region about to be crossed (or rather, gutted) by the Lisbon-Treviso-Budapest highway, where workers are exploited for life and dismissed with extreme hypocrisy. The film has the slow, meandering pace of a country ballad, whose protagonists are against Google Maps and prefer to draw their route on pieces of paper. But for Giulio, a contemporary twenty-year-old, they become mythological characters who have everything about life figured out. Divine Providence assists the disjointed trio and leads them on a picaresque adventure they will never forget. (Paola Casella)
