The City of the Living

Anyone who has read Nicola La Gioia’s La città dei vivi fears they might encounter certain gruesome scenes in the film. There is no other word for it; the Americans would describe them as ‘graphic’. Fear not, they are not there. The atrocious murder – and, before that, the torture suffered by 23-year-old Luca Varani – are not shown on screen. Their brutality remains off-screen. There is a certain randomness in the choice of victim, who belonged to a family of fairground workers. His father is played by Valerio Mastandrea, in the role of the beaten-down character that has by now become synonymous with him – see also, again from the Venice Film Festival and already in cinemas, the mortuary nurse who philosophises amongst the corpses in Gianni Amelio’s film *Nessun Dolore*. It is certainly a bold choice; the crime has remained etched in the collective memory for its atrocities. Yet it pays off: we knew quite a lot about the killers, but far less about the victim. The son of a travelling fairground operator, many scenes show the young man going about his daily work: setting up and dismantling the rides, organising the ticket office. Then there is his girlfriend, and the evening card games with his parents. The film no longer needs the novel; it stands very well on its own, as a story of the suburbs – the new suburbs, not the ones Pier Paolo Pasolini was fond of. The D’Innocenzo brothers withdrew their credit due to artistic differences with the director. Nicola Lagioia, on the other hand, greatly appreciated it.