Renato De Maria
Paz!

THE REVIEW

"I live on the edge... I am moved in the slums... I talk to those wanted by the state... I conspire... I procure and squander millions... then I risk... I pine... I humiliate myself... I surrender... I surrender... then I get high and everything becomes beautiful again, more radiant than before... the alternative is the pub, work, saving, the normal decay of the body, study, love, the natural fool, the likable, the unlikable, 2+2 equals 4 and wake-up at 8!... it's even worse over there than here... would you prefer to rise again... rise again... rise again... RISE AGAINNNN..."

It sounds like a literary piece, theatrical, and yet it is part of one of Andrea Pazienza's masterpieces, a comic artist, and a genius who left too soon. And it is also the culminating monologue of this extraordinary film, based on the works of Paz himself (that’s how he was called and that's how he signed), and it is performed by Penthotal, the perfect depiction of depression and post-adolescent youth discomfort in which, somehow, each of us might find ourselves or have found ourselves at some point in life.

The other characters are Zanardi, the eternal high schooler in whose life the absolute nothingness transforms into cruelty and cynicism towards everyone and everything, and Fiabeschi, a university student behind with coursework, who in a tragicomic manner tries to pass an exam to avoid compulsory military service. However, his main interest is smoking, numbing his mind in a way to avoid opening his eyes and facing reality, adulthood, which is impatiently waiting for him, unacceptable for anyone.

The stories in the film intersect, the characters sometimes meet briefly, everything unfolds within 24 hours, starting the night before and ending the night after, as if the director wanted to take us through a dramatic, funny, tragic, comic, grotesque, sad, melancholic, and essentially hopeless journey. Set in Bologna at the end of the 70s, the film throws in your face the drama of the youth condition never fully understood, which over the course of the stories told becomes a pessimistic reflection, but in a grotesque way, on the human condition.

The ending, emblematic, is the perfect close of the circle: the suffocating lack of meaning for anything, self-destruction, the rejection of a reality that first rejected you. A cry that can no longer exorcise rage and pain but can only narrate them, with a sharp irony and a mocking smile plastered on the face.