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VENICE 2021 Out of Competition

Review: The Catholic School

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- VENICE 2021: Stefano Mordini’s film about the origins of a historic episode of violence against women fails to tackle this vital issue with sufficient maturity

Review: The Catholic School
Emanuele Maria Di Stefano in The Catholic School

“To be born male is an incurable illness”: this is one of the key phrases to feature in the novel by Edoardo Albinati upon which Stefano Mordini has based his homonymous film The Catholic School [+see also:
trailer
interview: Stefano Mordini
film profile
]
, presented out of competition in a world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. It’s a novel which drills down into the hell that is violence against women, inspired by a true Italian crime known as the Circeo Massacre, which served as a watershed moment between two eras on an issue which is now highly topical. On the night of 29 September 1975, three Roman boys - Angelo Izzo, Gianni Guido and Andrea Ghira - lured two girls who trusted them and who came from the city outskirts to a house by the sea, before torturing and raping them all night long. Then, believing them to be dead, they abandoned them in the boot of a car in Rome. Only one of the girls survived. In the aftermath of this tragedy the law on physical violence changed, with the latter no longer considered a crime against public decency but a crime against one’s person.

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Albinati was at school - specifically the San Leone Magno establishment in a residential area of Rome - with the three boys who carried out the massacre. The writer didn’t feel it necessary to write about the crime itself, opting instead to explore day to day life as it was back then, as well as examining the boys’ schoolmates and the teachers at the Catholic school, starting with the childhood of the former and describing their transition from wild teens to ferocious assassins. It’s a reconstruction of evil from its root causes, which is, moreover, the same approach taken by the film’s screenwriters Massimo Gaudioso, Luca Infascelli and director Mordini. By way of the voice-over delivered by protagonist-observer Edoardo (Emanuele Maria Di Stefano), the film follows the first generation to have enjoyed total freedom, homing in on those who received a Catholic education from a school whose pillars are “persuade, threaten, punish”, and where Christian values are taught to youngsters for whom violence is the order of the day. To overcome or be overcome, to lie in order to be accepted, to never really be yourself, to take an unhealthy and warped view of sexuality. Outside of school, these Catholic families display hypocrisy (betraying one another, hiding their sexual orientations) as well as disinterest, and are, for the most part, absent, believing themselves protected by certainties and values which are actually crumbling around them.

Punctuated by investigative-cinema-style titles such as “six months earlier” and ”130 hours earlier”, aimed at forging a link between past and present in a relentless toing and froing which risks confusing easily distracted viewers, the film does demonstrates Warner’s noteworthy commitment to production, drawing out an entire generation of young actors – in addition to Di Stefano, there’s Giulio Fochetti, Leonardo Ragazzini, Alessandro Cantalini, Andrea Lintozzi, Guido Quaglione, Federica Torchetti, Luca Vergoni, Francesco Cavallo, Angelica Elli, Beatrice Spata and Giulio Tropea – and placing them alongside the more famous names of Valeria Golino, Riccardo Scamarcio, Jasmine Trinca, Benedetta Porcaroli, Giulio Pranno, Fausto Russo Alesi, Fabrizio Gifuni and Valentina Cervi. But the directorial approach taken by Mordini, who is now on his seventh feature, seems to lack the maturity required to tackle such a crucial matter. Instead, he conforms to TV tastes and only examines the surplus of characters involved in the affair at surface level. The movie fails to establish a sufficiently solid and convincing link between the Catholic school of the film’s title and the boys’ urge to violently overpower their victims, and it also glosses over the fascist circles frequented by the perpetrators of the massacre. In short, it fails to paint the picture which the film’s historic setting required and deserved.

It’s not that the movie should betray the novel, which is composed of 1,200 pages of reflections and a thousand different narrative streams, but it could have derived an equally powerful film interpretation which might have helped younger, cinema-going generations to fight against sexist stereotypes and moralism; a task which the long, savage and heavy-handed final minutes of the film dedicated to the Circeo tragedy fail to accomplish.

The Catholic School is a Warner Bros. Entertainment Italia and Picomedia production. Distribution in Italy (7 October) is in the hands of Warner Bros. Pictures.

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(Translated from Italian)

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