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International English
title: Crime Novel, Italy, 2005
directed by Michele Placido, starring Kim Rossi
Stuart, Pierfrancesco Favino, Claudio Santamaria, Stefano Accorsi,
Anna Mouglalis, Jasmine Trinca, Elio Germano
The worst defect of Italian cinema? Passing over a very complex topic
that needs to be faced sooner or later - the perverse mechanisms of
our production - it can be found in the so called "two rooms
and a kitchen syndrome", which is the incapability of going beyond
the insignificant and dull story that can be told without disturbing
important topics and expensive productive means. In my opinion, in
the last 20 years of Italian cinema only two films have successfully
crossed the threshold of our wretched bounds, thanks to their precious
aesthetic quality: Like Come due coccodrilli (Like
Two Crocodiles) by Giacomo Campiotti (1994) and Le conseguenze
dell’amore (The Consequences of Love) by Paolo Sorrentino,
of the past year. The two films owe their undoubted success to a fascinating
visual framework, based on the smoothness of a personal story coherently
developed.
The third feature film that rises above the wretched garden of Italian
cinema is this superb Crime Novel. It achieves the same but moves
from a different assumption: Placido undertakes an amazing enterprise,
he uses the most well-tested means of genre cinema and plunges his
film into our recent history, he uses it as mere narrative paradigm
for the cinematographic product in question.
Romanzo criminale is not a historical movie, nor
a work of social or political denunciation. It is a terse and violent
detective story, that shakes the spectator with shootings. Based on
the novel by Massimo De Cataldo, the script written by Rulli and Petraglia
complies with the rules of its genre and exploit their manifold possibilities:
the story of the rise and fall of the three criminals leading the
ill-famed "Magliana band" has the stylistic features of
the great gangster story, the characters are similar to those of American
epic. Not only Italo-crime is brought into play in this feature film,
but also the epochal stories of perdition by Scorsese and De Palma
first of all. Since these are killers who actually existed, who were
involved in the most dark pages of our recent history, everything
seems more credible and more real. Romanzo criminale
- consistent with what the film wants to be - does not seek the truth
of real facts and their causes, it seeks the truth necessary to make
the story and its protagonists as much paradigmatic as possible and
therefore functional to the story. It isn't an accurate reconstruction
of events, but a violent crime story and Placido prefers being faithful
to his characters to the layout of the film. The direction is compact
and nervous, extremely attentive to the psychologies and interpretations
of the actors, the greatest asset of the film. Having to face well
defined and paradigmatic "strong" roles, the most logic
choice was to cast actors able to express the charisma of the characters.
Kim Rossi Stuart, Pierfrancesco Favino, Claudio Santamaria and Stefano
Accorsi, in the most contradictory role, give their best.
Sharp, precise, perfectly developed in accordance with some simple
guiding principles, Romanzo criminale is one of the
best Italian films of these years. What we approve of the film is
not only its success, but the idea of the project: its attention is
focused to genre cinema, it is written and realized with the clearness
of one that knows his means and fully uses them. Michele Placido,
much (and rightly) vituperated by us when he launched out in the marsh
of existential authorship, wins back our whole admiration with this
film.
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