02/07/2024 - Documentary filmmaker Romano Montesarchio makes his fiction debut, and manages to lend a personal, feverish and hallucinating angle to a story of mafia and denied love

Only a cinema encyclopaedia can tell us how much the psychopathology of criminal behaviour in mafia systems has fascinated screenwriters and directors, both in a grotesque and a dramatic register. Romano Montesarchio, an expert documentarian, adopts instead an anti-realistic and personal angle for his fiction debut, Glory Hole, which world premiered in the Panorama section of the Shanghai International Film Festival. Nevertheless, the filmmaker from Caserta draws inspiration from very concrete and cruel news (and political) items, this phenomenon of eco-mafias that have indiscriminately poisoned parts of the Italian territory, corrupting and enriching themselves without measures at the expense of citizens. The intention, however, isn’t to direct another episode of Gomorra, but to dive into the internal dimension of a protagonist of organised crime, a white collar criminal of the Camorra organisation who makes money with the illegal disposal of toxic waste.

The plot of Glory Hole isn’t one to make you jump out of your seat with its originality. It’s a love story in a criminal environment, distorted and sick to the point of paradox, in which the very negation of love and beauty is required. But the script, written by the director with Edgardo Pistone and Stefano Russo, reserves a few interesting drifts and shifts that take us through the 95-minute running time.

At a party, Silvestro (a new demonstration of skill by Francesco Di Leva) meets the young Alba (Mariacarla Casillo), daughter of the boss for whom he works (Gaetano Di Vaio, also producer on the film, who died in an accident last May). The two start a secret relationship, an impossible union that goes against all the rules of mafia families and which soon spirals into chaos. Silvestro is forced to hide in one of those bunkers full of tunnels used by fugitives, the ones we see in news reports – tombs equipped with all the comforts except for freedom of movement (well done to the set designer Massimiliano Forlenza). In his secrecy, Silvestro is helped by two childhood friends, Don Peppino, a priest (Mario Pirrello) who seems lost as well, and the extravagant owner of a private club, to which we owe the film’s title (Roberto De Francesco, great as always). But the circle is getting tighter for Silvestro, paranoia keeps rising and reality turns into a nightmare.

With a very current aesthetic that looks to the younger spectator who grew up with Nicolas Winding Refn, the photography by Matteo Vieille Rivara knows no half measures, playing with the in and out of focus and colouring each scene with very clear tones, whether the livid, grey-blue natural light or the blood red neon of the club, or the green of the subterranean tunnels in which polarised human figures move. The indecipherable strings orchestrated by maestro Mario Tronco and a directing consisting of fixed cameras and slow movements, interspersed with images from surveillance cameras, create an obsessive and claustrophobic film, dreamlike and feverish, hallucinating and ferocious. At times sententious (“in the end, everyone misses something”, “I hate pretending to be happy”) in its search for the humanity in the monster, the film reveals itself slowly and culminates in a final monologue of brutal concreteness, a confession-J’accuse very close to a civil theatre performance: “I’ve been the solution to all your problems… I’ve gained power and money in exchange for the health of my children’s children.”

Glory Hole was produced by Bronx Film, Minerva Pictures, Eskimo, Rai Cinema. Minerva Pictures Group handles international sales.

(Translated from Italian)