Francesco Munzi
Anime nere

[Contains plot]

Anime nere stands out sharply from typical mafia movies; its richness lies primarily in its ability to strip away those tropes that seem inevitable when discussing this type of narrative. Munzi shows us with great effectiveness that a drama doesn’t necessarily have to manifest in an ostentatiously violent form. Considering the broader category of gangster films, I believe it can be asserted with some certainty that we are facing an extreme polarity of the continuum that ideally stretches from the maximal use of violence to its total absence. Here, there are hardly any shootouts; only 3 or 4 shots are fired throughout the film. Yet, rather than diminishing the corrosive power of the narrative, the visual absence of violence intensely amplifies its effects, for two reasons; on one hand, the anticipation of the bloody unfolding of conflict eats away at the viewer throughout the narration, on the other, the human reactions to every single word, every threat, every bullet, are explicated with excruciating depth.

The operation is intelligent; it’s pointless to attempt to stage the classic conflict between mafia families, it’s already been done with great success. It’s better to delve into the whole knot of feelings, pains, and more or less intense contrasts, among rivals but especially among the different character inclinations of the same family's members. In fact, one might say that the issue of the contrast between the protagonists’ family and the rival Barreca family is almost avoided, due to a determined will not to confront the novelistic and, we might say, super-heroic dimension of criminality. Munzi does not grant his viewers the flattery, never confessed but undeniable, of revenge that the protagonists take on their enemies. The audience's siding with a faction is indeed misleading; by granting no vindication, the director shifts the focus from the partial issue of the primitive desire to see a long-awaited revenge achieved to the upstream problem of the self-destructive senselessness of such logic. Anime nere works on the mortification of all the clichés that turn tragedy into fiction; no blood, no macabre enjoyment, only the pitch-black remains of a life that is truly a «living death».

What remains, then, is the human and environmental fresco; the former is a mosaic of geometric definiteness, with the tiles distinguished by different shades of gray that separate Luciano's painful candor from Leo's nihilistic and blind blackness. In this human scenario, we find many different souls, never completely black, representing the true thematic core: the arrogant and simultaneously naive arrogance of Luigi, not coincidentally the first victim of the tragic mechanism, the sharp lucidity and inner fragility of Rocco, Luciano's disillusionment that sinks his only hopes into the sacred sentiment and family bonds, up to the absolute and almost blameless recklessness of his son Leo.

The contrasts between the different souls of a single family are explored, appearing more fragmented and heterogeneous than ever; they don't even plan a revenge; everything unfolds among the various centrifugal forces that disintegrate the already precarious family system. Luigi invites a formidable local boss to Luciano's home, incurring the wrath of his older brother and especially the unappealable sentence of the Barreca enemies; Rocco is torn between an eager desire for revenge and the substantial fragility of his temperament, Luciano resigns himself to the idea that by making such a powerful family an enemy, their destiny is already sealed. In this chessboard, Leo, who takes the initiative, escaping his father and uncle's control; but his friend's betrayal seals his fate. At this point, Rocco’s inertia shows its guilt, and it's the desperate father who acts: he doesn't even attempt revenge, knowing it would lead to nothing. Luciano, and this is the intelligent final passage of the plot, merely accelerates the destruction of his family; symbolized by the sequence in which he burns the photo of his father, his guardian deity until that moment. With the killing of his brother Rocco (and presumably himself), he completes a process that had become inevitable.

The absence of aesthetic frills, a dark cinematography, sparse dialogues, and the almost total lack of music; all formal elements contribute to unmasking the deep sense of deadly entanglements between rival clans, which is a slow but relentless process of erosion of an increasingly fragile and sick social and human fabric. The deaths of men, too often shown in movies as the elimination of pawns from a great chessboard, have a sinister impact on the entire human network of which those men were a part. This explains the emphasis on long litanies recited by women after Luigi's death; a strong theme is the revelation of the slow but capillary reaction of grief that society has in response to slayings. If the family heads discuss what to do, the women pray, the mothers despair, the priests preach in vain; the children grow up reckless. With Leo's absurdly naive action and his father’s destructive reaction, the circle of wickedness closes: Leo’s frenzy is a product of a terribly miseducative environment, Luciano’s response is the surrender of the wise man faced with the suffocating supremacy of unstoppable evil mechanisms.

The tragedy doesn’t even have its catharsis; Leo’s death is cut, as if out of a sense of modesty, Luciano’s reaction is muted in aesthetic rendering and devoid of any tragic or aesthetic emphasis. His actions are glacial, there is no possibility of a dialogue with the family: if even the cautious man, who allows himself to be humiliated to avoid a perverse mechanism, suffers the extreme torture of seeing a brother and son dead, then there is no hope to nurture, it’s better to extinguish the existence of the whole family immediately. It makes no sense to continue living.