Reviews

This masterpiece dates back to 1995, and despite that it still manages to evoke with the crudest and evocative style the essence of a poor banlieu, where discomfort and social degradation reign, an evergreen source of violence and claustrophobic fear in these kids who, unlike their peers of better birth, see no chance of a concrete future and can only try to escape, through various channels, from a present plight.

This is not a film with an articulated and refined interweaving, therefore there is almost nothing that can be 'unfortunately' revealed. What strikes me, and on which I would like to dwell, is the tone of Violence that pervades all the scenes, from first to last. A violence that is above all, if not almost exclusively, verbal: there is hardly any trace of blood, yet there is a constant tension in the air, very strong on an emotional level. The life of these young people flows in the indifference of the world, an almost total indifference, were it not for the policemen who treat them from animals, and for which they harbor a (in fact) visceral hatred.

Loneliness and discomfort that results, especially in the irascible Vinz, in practically all ways of expression of these poor boys: they do not have an adequate and polite language, at least according to some non-execrable parameters of civil life, to express their questions, their aspirations and fears.

The preferential lane is missing; hence the use of violence as the only means expression, as is evident in the famous vernissage scene, in which also a normal flirtation with two girls from the center turns into incomprehensible occasion of brawl and quarrels, to seal which (brilliant choice of screenplay) the enlightened person in charge of the event played by Kassovitz's father announces "the malaise of the periphery ...", almost justifying this malaise and detaching emotionally from the drama of this lack of communication.

The more the story goes on, the more these three guys arouse a real tenderness in me, mixed with the desire that the hatred of many suburbs social and existential similar to this can be transformed into positive energy and will to build something, instead of destroying.

I conclude by applauding the choice of black and white cinematography, a sign of a rough direction that does not compromise, and spares us the unrealistic nuances and not essential to the story they want to tell.

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.