Review by Beatrice On 07-Aug-2024
Enough. That is, sufficient but not satisfactory. Approximations satisfy but do not always suffice.
A sandwich with chicory in the car.
Laughter, friendship, complicity.
A suburban slang spoken with a mouth full, mostly incomprehensible but effective.
Roman suburbs, Ponte di Nona, outside the ring road.
As the car moves, a thud, a body on the ground, what to do?
Escape, maybe no one saw.
Manolo's father, who lives in a garage, suggests saying nothing, talking to no one.
Mirko lives with his mother, whom he loves dearly; his girlfriend is also a very important figure in his life.
The man hit during the night is a repentant member of Roman crime, and the opportunity must be seized to join the rival clan: the opportunity is unique, says Manolo's father, it is the turning point.
The (ir)replaceable workforce of crime requires murders, drug dealing, prostitution exploitation, even of minors.
But being the children of abjection is not enough to become criminals.
Having a friend/brother with whom to share the fate is not enough to continue being one.
Starting to commit crimes is not enough to bear that life.
Manolo proposes, Mirko does not understand.
Friendship is not enough, money is not enough, cynicism, disillusionment is not enough.
The land of enough is not "enough" for Manolo, who explains to Mirko how to "not think to act" despite continuing to feel something bigger than himself.
Manolo wears a mask behind which looms a feeling of urgent anguish.
Killing, dealing, dreaming of another life while distributing water and condoms to the enslaved workforce on the streets, and while the bosses test the lifeless bodies of the newly arrived minors.
Not everything can be bought; spending three thousand euros for his sister's birthday is not enough, his mother's gaze unsettles and disturbs the suppression of guilt.
The first experiment of the D'Innocenzo brothers is perfectly successful: it will pave the way for the recurring concepts of their later works: the mean world of adults, the opacity of the way, the gaze of children and adolescents, suicide, existential claustrophobia, the ontology of human misery.
The inability to abdicate simplification: behind evil there is not only the superficiality of a non-choice but the conflict, the pain, even if unreflected, anonymous, impersonal.
For the boss, capital is never enough but the workforce, the labor, gets its hands dirty for him, and not all workers are ready to work on that inhuman and abject assembly line at the base of the surplus value produced by surplus labor with the aggravating factor of the unbearable weight of the psyche, where indifference does not reign and leaves room for the problem of guilt and responsibility.
Not everyone is structured to bear the weight of the world, even crime requires talent: combining evil with banality and indifference.
Living long depends on destiny, living enough depends on wisdom.
07-Aug-2024 by Beatrice
