Forget the idea of deranged gangsters: a new Italian film about the Mafia shows them as urbane technocrats writes Clare Longrigg
The ageing protagonist of The Consequences of Love looks at first sight like an unpromising hero for a Mafia film: a suited, unsmiling businessman living in a Swiss hotel. Titta Di Girolamo's days are uneventful and routine. An orderly man, he has reduced his life to a functional minimum, measured out in cigarettes.
Later we discover why: he used to be a stockbroker, and the Mafia was one of his clients. When he lost, through error, a large quantity of the Mafia's money, they punished him with a life sentence as a money launderer, delivering a suitcase of money to a Swiss bank every week without fail.
This image of the white-collar Italian mafioso is a long way from the received idea of mobsters, particularly in American cinema, as disorderly, out of control and fatally flawed. The great American Mafia films took the mob's point of view, and created magnificent outlaws - Marlon Brando's Vito Corleone and Robert De Niro's young Vito in The Godfather, Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas.
"I love Scorsese and Coppola's films," says Paolo Sorrentino, director of The Consequences of Love. "They're great portraits, but they fell in love with mafiosi. They have mythologised organised crime."
Italian directors have to deal with another level of criminality, the Mafia's corrupting influence pervading all levels of society. In the greatest Italian films, the Mafia is portrayed not through outsized gangsters but as an insidious and faceless part of the system.
Italian cinema has often taken a safe moral stance, looking at the Mafia through the people trying to bring them to justice. La Scorta (The Escort, 1993), directed by Ricky Tognazzi, is the story of an anti-Mafia judge told through his police escort - those glamorous young men in shades and bulletproof jackets who spend their lives hanging around outside law courts or ushering their charge in and out of armour-plated cars. Made the year after judges Falcone and Borsellino were murdered with six members of their escorts, the film draws heavily on the events of their last months, including a bomb discovered outside Falcone's beach house. The story of these young policemen, with young children and elderly mothers, is a tear jerker, a tribute to those who risk their lives daily in the line of duty.
The true story of one of the heroes of the anti-Mafia struggle has been told in I Cento Passi(The Hundred Steps, 2000). Peppino Impastato was a young Communist party agitator, from a Mafia-controlled town outside Palermo, whose father was a mafioso. This was the early 1970s, when no one uttered the Mafia's name, in public or in print (the film was co-written by Claudio Fava, whose father was murdered for editing an anti-Mafia publication), and Impastato set up a radio station to broadcast tirades against Cosa Nostra's activities in "mafiopolis".
While Peppino criticised and lambasted his father and "friends", it was only his father's influence that stopped the local boss from killing him. That influence, albeit despised and derided, died when his father was killed in a car crash. Soon afterwards, Peppino was murdered. Marco Tullio Giordana's film focuses on the mafioso father's struggle with his son's disrespect, his fear of the Mafia boss's displeasure, and the love he bears his son.
FRANCESCO ROSI, ONE of Italy's greatest directors, understood that it was too simplistic to condemn the Mafia; he was interested in society's relationship with organised crime. Several of his films follow investigations that remain unsolved: they are merely concluded by those with an interest in leaving matters as they are. Salvatore Giuliano (1962) offers a portrait of the social and political forces at work in postwar Sicily: as the notorious Sicilian bandit of the title makes deals with separatists, and then the government, and the Mafia (although the word is never mentioned), to defeat the left, Giuliano becomes a pawn in the hands of more powerful forces. His death scene, which opens the film, has been staged, and the official version of events only obscures the facts.
Rosi's dark and ominous Le Mani Sulla Città (Hands Over the City, 1963), is set in Naples at election time, where politicians of all colours stand to benefit from property speculation that is blighting the city. Developer Edoardo Nottola, played by Rod Steiger, is publicly disgraced after the devastating collapse of an unsafe apartment building. But Nottola has powerful friends; he is the man who can deliver the Mafia's block vote.
We see him just once in the company of his Mafia friends, at a rowdy dinner table. One mafioso in shades and pomaded hair reassures him: "The people will do what we tell them to do."
There is something inexorable about the Mafia's operations: ordinary people who try to resist are routinely crushed. In this context, the smallest act of rebellion becomes heroic.
When we finally meet the Mafia boss in The Consequences of Love, we never even see his face. Di Girolamo is brought before the mob's highest authority by a speeding cortege using remote control devices to enter a hi-tech underground labyrinth. Nothing is old-fashioned about these people, except their methods of torture.
The Consequences of Love opens on Fri, May 27, at the IFI, Dublin