Claudio Caligari
Amore Tossico

"Nun te capisco, se sbattemo pe' mette insieme quattro lire pe' fasse uno schizzo e tu te pji er gelato??!"

This film is one of the few Italian films, perhaps the only one, that talks about drug addiction for what it is, without romanticizing but simply showing us the lives of these young people from the Roman suburbs who spend their days trying to gather money to "fasse no schizzo."

The director indeed draws inspiration from cinema vérité and neorealism by showing us how these young people spend their days, whose lives and relationships revolve around an absolute love for drugs. What strikes, besides the real scenes where you see the guys shooting up directly into their veins, is precisely the sense of personal annihilation, of self-extinction and the rest of the world, and how the only focus, the only pursuit, becomes money and the drugs: everything is shown without judgment, moralizing, interpretations or psychological analyses, and not even with dramatic effects, but merely showing the reality and the inherent harshness and tragedy in the reality of these desperate individuals. In some ways, it seems almost like a documentary, all accompanied by an unsettling and at times somewhat trashy soundtrack.

On one hand, the film echoes Pasolini as the actors are literally real drug addicts, a more tragic fact is that almost all of them died from drug addiction, who indeed use their own way of speaking (also for this reason, the director had difficulties completing everything given the precarious conditions of the actors who were often in withdrawal crises or arrested for crimes), and this also shows us the poetry and beauty of the true and the ugly as in the films of the Poet on one hand, and this is the only somewhat negative note of the film, to emphasize this reference slips into the banal, like the scene right under Pasolini's funerary monument, almost as if wanting to identify these damned suburban kids with those of the master, who had the opposite meaning.

Aside from that, it is to be praised that the director is perhaps the only one in Italy who had the courage to present a film, for me better than "Trainspotting" and "Christiane F", about addiction, about this love that encloses you and no longer lets you live.

Raw and unfiltered