16/10/2026 - Simone Catania’s film delivers an extraordinary performative face-off between Fausto Russo Alesi and Paolo Pierobon, in a tale of greed set on the border between Italy and Switzerland

“Between Milan and Switzerland lies a territory called Brianza. A place built on work, on money and on the fear of losing it.” No more analytical and fitting summary could be found than the caption we see at the start of Simone Catania’s second feature, laconically titled Brianza, presented in competition in the Progressive Cinema section of the Rome Film Fest. Born near Lake Como to Sicilian parents, Catania simply portrays a world he knows first-hand, drawing inspiration from a real news story that unfolded in that borderland with wealthy Switzerland.

The film focuses on Giorgio Farina, heir to a prestigious gun shop, and Alberto Fumagalli, a businessman who runs 12 petrol stations, played respectively by Fausto Russo Alesi and Paolo Pierobon, two of the finest actors of the 50-to-60 generation. It’s 2009, and the economic crisis is hammering the GDP of Western countries. Married to former Miss Brianza Valentina, a ditzy spendthrift (the sensational Marina Rocco, who specialises in such roles and always enriches them with comic flourishes), Giorgio has invested €800,000 in opening a luxury boutique in Switzerland and is now drowning in bank debt. For his part, Alberto, under threat of being dropped by the fuel multinational that owns the filling stations, goes on the offensive by deciding to make all the takings disappear. He asks Giorgio to hide the cash in the armoured gun cabinet in his shop, pending its transfer to Switzerland. Giorgio agrees, in exchange for €30,000.

The scarcely plausible partnership between the two tightens when Giorgio confesses he is on the brink of bankruptcy and asks his elderly mother (Gisella Burinato) to sell the family villa (in vain). Abandoned even by Franz (Christophe Sermet), who has worked at the gun shop since he was a boy, Giorgio walks into a full-blown trap sprung by Alberto, ready to lend him the money in exchange for everything the gunsmith holds dearest.

What unfolds between Alesi and Pierobon is not just a face-off, but a full-blown acting duel, under Catania’s astute direction; he co-wrote the screenplay with veteran Ugo Chiti and Fabio Natale (who was previously his collaborator on his debut feature, Drive Me Home). Alesi convincingly builds the character of a pathetic coward raised under the protective wing of a “self-made” father, tormented by the need to preserve his wealthy family’s respectability, an embodiment of chronic small-town meanness. In the opposite corner is Pierobon, energised by a character devoted to a ruthless eccentricity, a blend of Ubermensch-tinged shamanism and predatory instinct, always shadowed from a distance by his trusty and brutal bodyguard, Zimbaru (Giovanni Calcagno). Their bond takes on the contours of a classic Faustian pact with the devil.

For its social critique, Catania’s inspiration harks back to the North-East cinema of Carlo Mazzacurati and Alessandro Rossetto, transposed to the North-West, with that obsession with work that brings in money and the fact that he who hesitates is lost. Needless to say, aesthetically and in its feverish storytelling, the gaze turns instead to the Coen brothers’ Fargo: a deadly small-town crossroads where greed, gun worship, oppression and idiocy intersect.

Brianza is an Italian-Swiss co-production staged by Indyca and Beauvoir Films, in association with Rough Cat and RSI Radiotelevisione svizzera, and in collaboration with Rai Cinema.

(Translated from Italian)