Andrea Laszlo De Simone

What binds Andrea Laszlo De Simone to France is a connection that has developed along largely spontaneous lines. There's no need to dwell on the reasons behind such a "meeting of loving minds". Songs like "Conchiglie" or "Dal giorno in cui sei nato tu" have won over the hearts of the French with their shy, pure, disarming way of expressing a broad palette of feeling, happiness included. And the same goes for the soundtrack to the film "Il Regno animale", recently given its Italian national premiere at the Anteo Palazzo del Cinema in Milan, which sees De Simone collaborating with one of the leading names of the latest generation of French cinema, director and screenwriter Thomas Cailley.

After the widely acclaimed "Les Combattants" (released in Italy under the title "The Fighters – Addestramento di vita"), winner of the 2015 César for Best First Film, Cailley has finally returned to the director's chair. The film opened the Un Certain Regard section of the 76th Cannes Film Festival, and on this occasion too the acclaim it received at the César Awards was considerable. To be precise, with 12 nominations, the film was the most nominated in the entire prestigious showcase. This time, though, the final result didn't live up to the legitimate expectations, despite the great talent of the young rising star Paul Kircher and the slightly more mannered performances of French stars Romain Duris and Adèle Exarchopoulos, and despite Cailley's own enormous creative and conceptual effort. "Le Règne animal" had to go up against a war machine like "Anatomy of a Fall", which was in some ways less bold but essentially flawless and perfectly calibrated for international success, a success that duly followed.
"Le Règne animal" did, however, win the coveted award for best score, and rightly so, because it is a work of real distinction. Even though the music has been available since last autumn both on digital platforms and on physical formats (in Italy through 42 Records and in the rest of the world through Ekleroshock), it's listening to it alongside the images that fully reveals its charm and intensity. The images unfold and a small orchestra of strings, wind instruments and voices, underpinned by vaguely krautrock-flavored keyboards, gives rise to a kind of sensory experience. Nature within nature. The composer must have worked entirely in service of the film, through subtraction, in search of the primal innocence of inspiration and storytelling.

"Il Regno animale", which will be released in Italian cinemas on June 13, is a visionary, ambitious film, dense with meaning. Different grammars intertwine within it, ranging from fantasy to drama, moving effortlessly from the relentless pace of the thriller to the sustained rhythms of introspection. The philosophical subtext of an inevitable regression of humanity to an animal state — at once terrifying and liberating, almost metamorphic — intertwines with a language taut with expressive rawness. The result is an unbalanced, imperfect narrative, constantly at risk of excess, starting with its 128-minute running time.
The music of Andrea Laszlo De Simone, present in the theater and warmly applauded at the premiere, opens up compelling emotional landscapes, magnifies the green vastness of the exteriors, and deepens the weight of every glance. And so the animal kingdom takes shape, able to speak to each person's unconscious and to the collective "we" that one hopes might still emerge from it.

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