20/03/2024 - Marco Martani effortlessly delivers a third feature film, both a revenge thriller and a coming-of-age tale, based upon a theatre monologue by Massimiliano Bruno

Five young antiheroes seeking revenge, twenty years on from a tragic event which scarred their lives when they were little more than children. But the past always comes back to haunt us and, sooner or later, we have to face up to it… Marco Martani’s new movie Eravamo bambini [+see also:
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film profile], which was presented in the Alice Nella Città section of the 18th Rome Film Fest back in October and is due to hit Italian cinemas on 21 March courtesy of Europictures, is an accomplished blend of revenge thriller and coming-of-age film. Loosely based on Zero - a theatre text by Massimiliano Bruno, who also signs his name to the film’s screenplay alongside the director himself - Martani’s third feature film (after Concrete Romance [+see also:
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film profile] and She’s The One [+see also:
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It all begins in a small town on the Calabrian coast, where so-called Cacasotto (Francesco Russo), who’s generally seen as the village idiot, is stopped by the police near a powerful local politician’s villa at night-time with a long knife in his hand. Once at the police station, Cacasotto starts to talk. From which point, we’re immediately and individually introduced to the other protagonists, who are each wrestling with their own dysfunctional lives: Gianluca (Alessio Lapice) is a police officer who struggles to control himself when armed with a truncheon; Margherita (Lucrezia Guidone) works as a journalist but occasionally dips her toe into the most degrading kinds of sex; Walter (Lorenzo Richelmy) is a successful trapper who’s even coarse and surly with his little girl; and Margherita’s little brother Andrea (Romano Reggiani) is into hard drugs and takes regular beatings from loan sharks.

A string of heart-rending tranches de vie are paraded before us, interspersed with far warmer and more luminous images, which turn out to belong to far more distant times when these very same characters were little more than children spending their holidays with their parents by the Calabrian sea. When, years later, a text flashes up on one of these thirty-something characters’ mobile phones, summoning them to a long-awaited but rather unspecified showdown (“the time has come, ready or not”), the puzzle pieces slowly slide into place. A sixth member of that old group of friends emerges, Peppino (Giancarlo Commare), who’s the son of the terrible Rizzo (played by Massimo Popolizio) and who is himself traumatised by this “awkward” father figure.

The co-founder of production company Wildside who has authored over 50 film screenplays (including The Mafia Only Kills in Summer [+see also:
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interview: Pierfrancesco Diliberto
film profile], which won the 2014 EFA Prize), Martani manipulates the various fragments of this intriguing story with ease, gradually making the plot more accessible, maintaining a healthy measure of suspense until the end, and offering up a fair share of twists in the process. Buoyed by a cast of young but brilliant actors, who are perfectly in sync with one another and proficient in conveying the various nuances of their characters (they’re not heroes in search of revenge, they’re traumatised people who have been frozen in time since that tragic day twenty years earlier), the film offers a good, agonising and, at times, cruel variation on the theme of lost innocence.

Eravamo bambini is produced by Minerva Pictures and Wildside, in collaboration with Vision Distribution and Sky.

(Translated from Italian)