Vite perdute

Italy, 1992

Director: Giuseppe Greco (a.k.a. Giorgio Castellani)

Film Genre: Social drama, tragicomedy

Guión: Giuseppe Greco

Intérpretes:
Gianni Celeste (Rosario Raito), Filippo Genzardi (Pietro), Maurizio Prollo (Salvatore Arcuri), Salvatore Termini (Scimmietta), Alfredo Li Bassi (Filippo)

Plot

The film tells the story of the adventures of a group of young, half-baked delinquents in the turbulent Palermo of the early 1990s (sort of like the Sicilian “street dogs”). Several episodes follow one another, interrelated by the involvement of the members of the gang, who also separately do their own thing, in their respective microcosms.

At the beginning of the film, the story begins from the perspective of a poor starving wretch, who manages to steal a roast chicken with the help of a kind of trident, and who is madly in love with Lucia, a girl from a well-to-do family, who ignores him completely. As the unhappy man has no telephone at home, he writes a letter to Lucia begging her to call her neighbor’s phone, Signora Carmella, and she will call him back. Obviously, she will never call him; and without any news of the unfortunate man, the next scene takes us back to the criminal group’s escapades…

The leader of the gang is a twenty-year-old man named Rosario. He and his gang organize the kidnapping of Lucia, the daughter of a rich family. One day they intercept her at the exit of her house and force her into a car and drive away. A secret police patrol in the vicinity observes the events and sets out to arrest the criminals. A long chase through the streets of Palermo ensues, which then continues on the road through the mountains on the outskirts of the city. The kidnappers flee in two different cars, and one of them (with the police “already on their heels”), the one in which the kidnapped woman is also in, runs off the road and rolls down a steep slope, crashing into the rocks and exploding. Rosario, who was in the other car a little further ahead, watches the scene stupefied, and to avenge his friends, brakes, gets out of the car and riddles the pursuing policemen with bullets, whom he considers responsible for the tragedy.

At night he is in bed trying to sleep, unable to get to sleep because of the anguish caused by the events of the day, when his mother arrives (very worried about his unstable and erratic life) and admonishes him for “not continuing with his studies”, “not looking for a job”, etc., as mothers typically do.

Rosario’s mother works as a maid in the house of an influential politician, who is erotically attracted to her. She is logically a mature woman, but the chubby and bald “onorevole” is even more “mature”, and will take sexual advantage of her when Rosario is imprisoned after an attempted robbery, because with his influence he obtains the quick release of the young man in exchange for certain “favors” from the latter’s mother. Rosario is released not only due to the intercession of the politician, but also because an uncomfortable witness of his misdeeds has been intimidated by his henchmen so that at the time of the confrontation he suffers certain “mnemonic gaps”, declaring “not to remember” and “not to recognize” the offender among the suspects… Once the leader of the group is on the street, he meets with his “disciples” and a sort of parody of the last supper takes place.

But a policeman who looks like Bud Spencer, dissatisfied with the unfortunate fact that the thieves go out on the street shortly after being arrested and fed up with the impotence of justice to convict the criminals, will try to put an end to the raids of Rosario and his gang.

Comment

The plots within the plot are not always well woven, so that sometimes the “story-skeleton” that sustains the film is not fully understood. For example, the poor wretch who appears at the beginning, who in the first ten minutes is supposed to be the protagonist, and with whom the audience begins to feel great empathy, never appears again. This is attributable to the flaws in the script of this unknown (but interesting) transalpine production.

There are certain Pasolinian reminiscences, since we find portrayed that sub-proletariat with a tendency to commit criminal acts, a recurrent theme of the Bolognese filmmaker, as in “Accatone” (1961) or “Mamma Roma” ! 962) (and in Spain, of the cinema of
Eloy de la Iglesia, among others)… In this context Claudio Caligari’s “Amore Tossico” (1983) also comes to mind (starring, like “El Pico” (1983), real junkies and crooks), although this film is more along the lines of “Christiane F.” (1981) and the dramas of “Amore Tossico” (1983) and the heroin addict dramas of the eighties.

The director of these “Lost Lives” is the son of none other than the Sicilian Mafia boss Don Michele Greco (1924-2008), known as “The Pope” and mediator between the families of the Cosa Nostra, condemned in the Maxiprocesso of Palermo in 1986 – a sort of real-life Vito Corleone.

The soundtrack is provided by a great musician: Claudio Simonetti, leader of the Goblin, composer also of the excellent seventies/early seventies synth-rock-wave music that accompanies most of Dario Argento’s films (“Suspiria”, “Profondo Rosso”, etc).