‘Bravo Bene!’ review: Sicily’s Franco Maresco puts himself at the centre of his meta-mockumentary

Dir: Franco Maresco. Italy. 2025. 108mins

Sicilian director Franco Maresco’s surreal, provocative black comedies always threaten to collapse under the weight of the director’s mistrust of beginnings, middles and ends, not to mention his deeply pessimistic view of humanity. Now this weakness has become his subject. Bravo Bene! is a mockumentary about Maresco’s inability to make a film – one that ropes the film’s producer, screenwriters, costume designer and actors into a deadpan satirical inquest on what went wrong.

A niche curiosity

Imagine for a moment that the directors of Lost in La Mancha – the documentary about Terry Gilliam’s failed first attempt to make his Don Quixote film – had themselves been unable to finish their making-of, and that Harmony Korine was sent along to document the disaster, but screwed it up, and Armando Iannucci was tasked with picking up the pieces. Something like Bravo Bene! might result. Self-indulgent? Sure, especially as we get, embedded within the film, a potted history of Maresco’s career to date, told via voice-over, stills and archive footage.

This is more likely to baffle than to enlighten audiences outside of Italy, where the director is something of a cultural institution; a well-liked outsider artist and professional thorn in the side of the establishment. Maresco’s last, The Mafia is Not What It Used To Be, picked up a Special Jury Prize at Venice in 2019 and went on to score deals in a handful of territories – but that hybrid documentary had a serious political message which is lacking here.

Premiering in Venice Competition, Bravo Bene! may attract a loyal hardcore cineaste audience during its Italian theatrical run. Elsewhere, it will be a niche curiosity, one that could just score a few deals from distributors who cater to adventurous arthouse fans with a taste for (very) alternative subtitled comedies. 

The film’s Italian title, ’Un film fatto per bene’, is a play on words – at first sight it means ‘a well-made film’, but here it also means ‘a film made for Bene’. Carmelo Bene was another Italian artistic maverick, a gender-fluid 20th century avant-garde theatre director and filmmaker who spent his whole life fighting against worn-out theatrical conventions – and Italian critics. The film Maresco set out to make appears to have been a tribute to this trailblazer.

Bravo Bene! begins with Maresco’s own disappearance after his producer (the real Andrea Occhipinti of Lucky Red) pulls the plug on a shoot that has gone seriously off the rails. Actor Umberto Cantone plays one of the ‘Bene’ film’s scriptwriters (the fact that he gets a screenplay credit in this film may be another metacinematic game) who travels around Maresco’s Sicilian stamping ground, in the Palermo region, trying to find out where the director is hiding.

We see outtakes from the material Maresco shot before production was shut down. Very little, it seems, had to do with Carmelo Bene; much of the footage centres on a levitating friar and his donkey. Familiar faces from Maresco’s ramshackle stable of actors pop up (he has Fellini’s taste for oddball characters and freaks, weaponised). They are joined by new ones like Francesco Puma, an actual Italian film critic, who Maresco defines as “one of the most idiotic men I’ve ever met”, and seems to delight in torturing on set – in one instance by refusing to let the actor go to the bathroom when he has stomach cramps. At times, the film’s mix of uncomfortable games with the audience and schoolboy humour makes it feel like the work of a Sicilian Ricky Gervais.

Maresco’s relentless placing of himself at the centre of the film may be another satirical tactic. But it still becomes a little wearing – and will be especially so for audiences who have no idea who this guy is. Still, there are moments of priceless comedy – like a restaging of the chess game from Bergman’s Seventh Seal which falls apart when Death’s victim reveals he can’t play chess.