This is Claudio Caligari's latest film. Shortly thereafter, the
Lombard director will die.
A long career, almost thirty years in business, albeit incredibly poor in films: before the last film, only "Toxic Love" from 1985 and "The Night's Smell" of 1998. However, as taught by Sergio Leone's artistic story with only 7 titles under his belt, little is not synonymous with poor quality; ff anything, it can be an indication of freedom from the mechanisms of the system, in which the same laws of unbridled consumerism apply.
The film tells of the friendship between Vittorio (Alessandro Borghi) and Cesare (Luca Marinelli), two boys from the Roman suburbs, once again Ostia, in the 90s. A suburb which is told in all its brutal objectivity, described without giving in to easy idealizations, that does not mythologize the discomfort in operation of an almost epic transformation of the township universe. The people who live in this area, on the outskirts of Rome, are here relegated as marginal beings to the bourgeois and rich society of the capital. It is a miserable universe; miserably marked from the uselessness and insignificance of which the 'criminucci' and the small rounds of drugs of Vittorio and Cesare, nothing to do with the large traffic of the much bigger organized crime that we love to see so much in movies.
Within this very authentic world, a very simple story unfolds, of suffering and violence, imbued with evident Pasolinian references that confirm the desire to break away from a cinema of easy and hypocritical denunciation: as in "Accattone", poverty and almost brutal violence, the only language with which Cesare knows how to express himself, they are never treated with contempt or condemnation. A tenderness, as only of those who love the people they are about to tell, pervades this film, in which the sexuality is never vulgar, and violence, which is never justified by the discomfort that produces it, is not vulgarly free. Vittorio falls in love with a woman who a son grows up alone, and for her he decides to stop with a life of stratagems inconclusive and illegal; Cesare, however, is unable to get out of the 'circle', a lap which, I repeat, it is not the great Mafia tour, but rather a spiritual condition of instability and total fragility, subordinated to instinct and the effect of the latest drug launched on market. Yet, Cesare is still loved: Vittorio himself, at the cost of compromise with new employers, constantly seek employment for his friend.
It almost seems that the lack of many comforts now inseparable from our bourgeois society leaves a space for humanity: that powerful humanity, not at all romantic or cloying, which men who have nothing but who are capable of they give what little belongs to them.
A long career, almost thirty years in business, albeit incredibly poor in films: before the last film, only "Toxic Love" from 1985 and "The Night's Smell" of 1998. However, as taught by Sergio Leone's artistic story with only 7 titles under his belt, little is not synonymous with poor quality; ff anything, it can be an indication of freedom from the mechanisms of the system, in which the same laws of unbridled consumerism apply.
The film tells of the friendship between Vittorio (Alessandro Borghi) and Cesare (Luca Marinelli), two boys from the Roman suburbs, once again Ostia, in the 90s. A suburb which is told in all its brutal objectivity, described without giving in to easy idealizations, that does not mythologize the discomfort in operation of an almost epic transformation of the township universe. The people who live in this area, on the outskirts of Rome, are here relegated as marginal beings to the bourgeois and rich society of the capital. It is a miserable universe; miserably marked from the uselessness and insignificance of which the 'criminucci' and the small rounds of drugs of Vittorio and Cesare, nothing to do with the large traffic of the much bigger organized crime that we love to see so much in movies.
Within this very authentic world, a very simple story unfolds, of suffering and violence, imbued with evident Pasolinian references that confirm the desire to break away from a cinema of easy and hypocritical denunciation: as in "Accattone", poverty and almost brutal violence, the only language with which Cesare knows how to express himself, they are never treated with contempt or condemnation. A tenderness, as only of those who love the people they are about to tell, pervades this film, in which the sexuality is never vulgar, and violence, which is never justified by the discomfort that produces it, is not vulgarly free. Vittorio falls in love with a woman who a son grows up alone, and for her he decides to stop with a life of stratagems inconclusive and illegal; Cesare, however, is unable to get out of the 'circle', a lap which, I repeat, it is not the great Mafia tour, but rather a spiritual condition of instability and total fragility, subordinated to instinct and the effect of the latest drug launched on market. Yet, Cesare is still loved: Vittorio himself, at the cost of compromise with new employers, constantly seek employment for his friend.
It almost seems that the lack of many comforts now inseparable from our bourgeois society leaves a space for humanity: that powerful humanity, not at all romantic or cloying, which men who have nothing but who are capable of they give what little belongs to them.