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Rating: “Look how beautiful it is.” “It's beautiful.” Whether it's t-shirts, shoes, watches, or guns, submachine guns, rifles, the reaction of Neapolitan children is always the same. Their linear thinking does not go beyond that, and devoid of moral pathways to follow, they embrace video games and drug dealing, nightclubs and extortion with the same naive openness.
The paranza of the children is a poem about the end of the world. The story is so strong and devastating that it needs to be softened by the direction because it already hurts too much as it is. With a face like that of the young protagonist, played by Francesco Di Napoli, there is no need to add much: in those features, there is all the immaturity of fifteen years and all the coldness of these youths who have no qualms about shooting, sniffing cocaine, threatening death, asking for weapons from imprisoned bosses.
It is no coincidence that the talented Giovannesi insists on close-ups of Nicola (whose name hardly appears, he is a paradigm) because we already know the world around him and his friends, and here, it’s fundamentally about neighborhood skirmishes. The subject is not the camorra, but the many Nicola's who "blossom" in those neighborhoods. It's impossible to explain them only with social and cultural reasoning: there is a lucid madness in this boy's eyes, a fascination for evil that cannot merely be the result of external conditioning. It is in those icy eyes that that beastly hunger condenses, that wanting everything immediately. An obscene and infernal miracle that turns into daily practice.
Of course, the social portrait is inevitable and well-presented. But without redundancies, without emphatic underlining as in a melodrama. We are in a subsequent phase of the story, where details are chiseled. There is, for instance, a mother who sees her fifteen-year-old son counting thousands of euros in cash and doesn't dare to ask him where they come from because she knows, she doesn't dare blame him because he is the man of the house, but she can only embrace him with a frozen heart, knowing that she will soon lose him.
And there are the children, not fifteen but ten years old, who rejoice at the sight of guns and rifles, excitedly wielding them. A harmful culture that has penetrated every crevice and has soiled the minds and hearts even of the little ones. Or the girls, who are not surprised by weapons and cocaine but neither dare nor want to talk about it, because that is still their first love, and nothing can ruin it.
Similarly, the minds of Nicola and his companions travel on absurdly parallel tracks: savvy criminals, fierce, and at the same time frivolous boys, just like all the others, with Gallipoli in mind, Nike shoes, a new scooter. Boys who kiss their moms every morning and argue with their brothers over snacks. But soon they will begin to sleep with a gun under their pillow.
The work of Saviano and Giovannesi, among its many merits, perfectly combines mimesis of reality and a "novelistic" approach, but without distortions, without denaturing or embellishing what is not beautiful. The narrative strength lies entirely in the realism, in the dizzying absurdity of these lives, in the inexplicable rapacity of these children. In short, reality far exceeds fantasy. And the authors manage to bring it out with a naturalness worthy of great Italian cinema.
There is no judgment, no emphasis, no moralizing sermon. Everything is so striking that just showing it is enough to give the sense of catastrophe.
8/10
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