Daniele Vicari
Velocità Massima

I have learned the hard way that when you're faced with the debut film of a young Italian director, there's a good chance you'll encounter a morally diligent, introspective piece.

That's why I was very pleasantly surprised by this debut work from Daniele Vicari in 2002. Finally some "real" characters and not stereotypes, whom the director has no desire to morally judge and who act according to the rules of mere survival in a society where grandiose flights and future expectations are absent, reflecting instead in everyday life the hopes lived day by day.

It's the life of Stefano (Valerio Mastrandrea) who lives day by day with his desolately empty workshop in Ostia, where he modifies old broken-down cars he can afford to live his moment of glory at night near the Obelisk, when the "tribe" gathers for the ritual of illegal street racing on the straight path at "maximum speed". His enemy is the spoiled brat Fischio, always with a new car, who because of his status is also the "owner" of the prettiest girl in the group. Giovanna flaunts her attendance at university as a desire to break away from that trash she acknowledges yet is inextricably wallowing in. The novelty is this 17-year-old boy, Claudio, who arrives on his scooter seeking refuge from his father's house&work plans and is "employed" almost unpaid as his assistant. He's a mechanical genius, and from an old wreck of a Ford Sierra Cosworth, he manages to create a racer that allows Stefano to compete with Fischio's luxury cars. And in that underworld, Claudio is the only one who, once smitten with Giovanna, has a desire to escape from the flat logic of the daily struggle, to build a life with the person he loves in an environment that offers a better prospect. An environment where the logic no longer holds that whoever owns the fastest car for one evening is the most respected and surrounded by "friends" and girls.

Claudio's naive dream will clash with a reality more complex and squalid than he can imagine and his final gesture will leave Stefano surprised: who knows if he will understand that the sort of message left on the space in front of the workshop is an invitation not to get bogged down in a life without a thrill worth living beyond the intoxication of speed on the avenues of Ostia.

Speaking of the skill of Valerio Mastrandrea in portraying a Stefano who, by lowering his gaze, makes it clear he's not the tough guy he pretends to be, and that of the young Cristiano Morroni as a determined yet sensitive Carlo, credit must be given to the director for filming the movie with a detachment from any possible redundancy, almost as if it were a documentary on those lives spent in perpetual passivity, without necessarily extracting justification or moral reprimand.

The same photography surprises with its detail and brightness both in the scenes around the workshop shack lost in the Ostia seaside sun and in the nocturnal episodes along the town's streets. The atmosphere of the film reminded me of another film set in this kind of world, Monte Hellman's "Two-Lane Blacktop", which was, however, a road movie. Yet the lives of characters crystallized in an existential void on the roads of the post-sixties American false dream are not so distant from those of these young suburban Romans of the 2000s.