Claudio Caligari
Non essere cattivo

THE REVIEW

DON'T BE BAD is the third and last film by Claudio Caligari, born in 1948 and unfortunately passed away just a few months ago.
He only made three films, roughly one every 17 years.

Caligari is known for TOXIC LOVE, a shock/cult film from the '80s about drug addiction set in Ostia (a coastal town near Rome), featuring "actors" who were actual addicts. A very heavy film. In the opinion of the writer, a masterpiece in its own way.

You might also know THE SCENT OF THE NIGHT, starring Valerio Mastandrea. This is also great, with a famous scene which is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT9oD4D-Vi8.

DON'T BE BAD is the story of Cesare (Luca Marinelli) and Vittorio (Alessandro Borghi), two inseparable friends who spend their days getting high, trying to make ends meet, and...looking for trouble.

We are in Ostia again, in 1995. There are drugs again, but this time it's pills, cocaine, alcohol...yet heroin will return once more.

DON'T BE BAD is practically TOXIC LOVE shot 30 years later and set about 15 years apart in time, more or less. And it opens just like TOXIC LOVE, once again with the ice cream scene, a cornet.

Caligari's cinema is damn realistic, truer than true. It's hard to watch this film with detachment. It's hard not to feel involved, or even empathize.

Another characteristic of Caligari's cinema is the bitter irony that pervades the film and the tragicomic nature of its characters.

The technical and acting aspects are also admirable.

In short, Caligari made only 3 films and now he's gone but he was truly a great director, with a style and a great sense and craft of cinema. Honor.

DON'T BE BAD is what the "bad girl" tells her uncle.

Easy to say.

Hard to put into practice when everything around you is squalor, degradation, ignorance. And especially when you were born and raised in all this, and it's all you have.
When there are no way outs, you still look for them, and so you speed through the tunnel at a crazy pace, hoping to get out of it as soon as possible...but you don't know or maybe you do know very well that at the end of the tunnel there's a wall and you'll crash into it.

But DON'T BE BAD.
Never be.