Pietro is an Italian 28 year old man, born on the night Italy won the world cup, living with his junkie brother Francesco, in a run-down apartment his parents left them on the outskirts of Italy's industrial centre, Turin. Pietro has all the odds against him in life. He appears to have some mental inability, which is never clarified in the film. But it is so over-acted by Pietro Casella, the lead, that I was waiting for a box of matches to fall and having Pietro saying “265 matches on the floor, 265 matches on the floor”.
The movie, directed by Daniel Gaglianone starts with the following title: 1. Emporio Armani, only to see that a group of kids bullying a tramp in the subway steal a Emporio Armani bag of the guy. A useless title. To my disappointment the whole movie is constructed by this kind of obvious titles, which do not add anything valuable to the narrative. Pietro looks in disgust at the violence the kids inflict on the tramp, and flees the scene because he is powerless in the situation. The film focuses on the moral decay of Italian society, where everybody is against everybody. And the weak, like Pietro, being the first victims of the harshness of contemporary Italian society. Every scene is made to make clear that people nowadays are nasty, but to be frank, the director repeats himself so often, that it actually becomes a farce instead of brutal reality. His brother repeatedly insults him; his brother’s friends treat him like a clown in every single scene; his shady boss, who pays him for leafleting, is always mistreating him. Every character is one-dimensional in this pic. “Normal” people are bad people without a heart and the mentally disabled are automatic saints, like the girl he meets at work.
To distract the audience of the limitations of the script, Gaglianone indulges himself in cinematic tricks which are supposedly there to enhance the cold outside world Pietro is experiencing, but are superfluous. The screen goes black, sound goes off, goes back on, for no apparent reasons. The only time it works in the film is when Pietro takes the girl from his work to a club with his brother and his shady friends. Here he feels so trapped and humiliated by them (everybody touches his girlfriend in ways they shouldn’t) that the music the club is playing gets louder and louder in Pietro’s head to convey his panic.
The scene in the club is the key scene in the film. Something snaps in Pietro. We’ve seen this all before. Remember Sling Blade? Also a film in which a victim, a mentally challenged naive man is at the focal point facing harsh conditions and mean people. But it is a more realistic portrait. Not all “normal” people are bad guys, and Billy Bob Thornton’s character in Sling Blade has got some mean streaks too. Three-dimensional characters and one-dimensional ones are the difference between this good American film and this lousy attempt of Italian cinematic social critique.
One sees the attempt of Gaglianone but there are to many flaws in this movie, and that’s why the director fails to bring across this reality of moral decay in modern-day Italian cities.
Rating: *
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