A portrait that leaves us perplexed, slightly worried and with unresolved questions. "Var-hami" has to do with "true": what is true, if not what you want to believe in? This is the question which starts the film, working on the border: the boundary between true and false. The subject, ambiguous, in constant balance between lies and truth, appearance and substance, he is hardly in focus: it is taken up through reflections and images that change its nature, between the walls of its anonymous living room. "To denature" is the artistic process that his father, addressing it to his paintings, passes on to his son Davide, hypnotist mentalist, who turns it into a show. The shots investigate, once again, an arduously graspable character.
Commentary by Dario Agazzi: The irony is subtle, barely mentioned, in the interaction between director and character. The camera eye is constantly looking for something.
The mentalist relates to the society and is nourished by it, therefore the portrait extends to society, bringing out the background figures from the main figure, object of the "documentary" analysis. The camera eye moves on subjects that are part of a desperately melancholy reality, 2000s crisis’ faces (total: even metaphysical), of a weak and faded northern Italy. (...)
Graduated in accountancy, the protagonist knows how to balance the accounts of the "work" of a mentalist from a remunerative point of view, plastered in a mask of smiling pleasure that leads him to think of circ