Joel Schumacher
Un Giorno Di Ordinaria Follia

I hate the heat.

It makes me become bad-tempered, nervous, hysterical. Once, I was on the highway, moving very slowly, so I decided to exit and take the secondary road. Mistake. A poorly managed intersection trapped me for 30 minutes in an absurd, immovable line of cars stuck under the summer sun. My blood boiled in my veins and I unleashed verbal protests and violent gestures against the car's dashboard.

Douglas, in the same situation, abandons the car and makes a gesture that, in hindsight, proves to be more than beneficial. From here begins the unemployed protagonist’s (with shattered nerves) fight against the system in "Falling Down" / "Un giorno di ordinaria follia" (1993). The original title foreshadows a fall that will lead to the individual's ultimate breakdown, shattered by the contradictions and unsustainability of the mechanism he finds himself living in.

The system is made up of absurd prices, scams, gratuitous violence, social restrictions, intolerant extremists, lack of humanity, annoying vagrants, and false courtesy. All things that, at some point, will happen to everyone in life in some way. The other day I was downtown and I paid the horrendous and unjustified sum of 2 euros and 10 cents for 30 cl of mineral water. My reaction was one of strong but contained indignation, and even in this case, I saw myself in Douglas, fiercely upset by the inflexible Korean vendor to whom he will not fail to express his outraged point of view. Here we are talking about a man with shattered nerves, to whom anything happens in a few hours, and all of it has a somewhat farcical taste. Gradually and unintentionally, Douglas will find himself with increasingly larger weapons in his hands, proportionate to his growing anger, to best express and vent his rage.

Simultaneously with the adventures of the irritable man, the last working day of the calm policeman Duvall unfolds, squeezed by his wife's anxieties and his colleagues' ironies, and who wants to complete his last mission with the utmost professionalism and sense of danger. The two figures, let's say the good and the bad, will meet in the finale in one last showdown to settle the score.

Joel Schumacher carries out the grotesque plot with skill, narrating the common anxiety of the citizen of big cities, although sometimes the film slows down a bit and Douglas's character remains "suspended between the just and the excessive." The result is a chilling metropolitan odyssey that reminds us of the bittersweet taste of ordinary daily madness.