La scuola cattolica

Summary

The film tries to deploy, in a quite unconnected way, the family and educational framework in which the youth of the wealthy class criminals who perpetrated the macho crime known as Circeo Massacre, of enormous event in Italy.

It is a pity that the director Stefano Mordini escamotee almost completely the political dimension of the crime, since he does not mention the fascist sympathies of the criminals, at a time when neo -fascism rises victorious precisely in Italy for the first time since the 2nd World War and advances with its instigations and hate crimes in many parts of the world, including Argentina.

Review.

This film describes the crime known as "Circeo Massacre", which occurred from 1975, as well as some students of the Catholic School for Men Leone Magno, among whom were their young perpetrators.

The film begins with the trunk of a car from which a female voice asks for help. Then it continues in a series of flashbacks where director Stefano Mordini tries to describe the cultivation broth from which the criminals came. There are a series of unconnected vignettes about classes at school, some of their rites and the families of some of the students (the voice of one of them acts as the rapporteur in off), some of which seem to conduct narratively to anywhere . From all these scenes a macho, misogyn and homophobic class matrix is released. Finally, we are shown the criminal act itself (which should not reveal so as not to subtract dramatic impact) from which those who would be their executors and who their victims in the anterior part of the film were emerging. Anyway, I consider that a dramatic progression is missing or, in any case, surprising the violence deployed with a certain conjunction of coldness and cruelty that it vaguely remembers (and saving the distances) to Saló from Pasolini. Perhaps physical violence has something that always implies an abrupt jump on its precedents.

Crime is an act of all these dimensions of hatred: a ruthless act of gender violence with its strong macho and misogynistic elements and also classist here that marked a before and after in Italian legislation. Unfortunately, and unlike Edoardo Albinati's novel on which it is based, Mordini almost totally hides the political dimension of crime, since it does not mention the fascist sympathies of criminals, at a time when neo -fascism rises victorious precisely in Italy for the first time since World War 2nd and advances with their instigations and hate crimes in many parts of the world, including Argentina.

I wasn't aware that this was a retelling of an actual rape murder in Italy and so I felt there was a lack of context for much of what happens, which sort of colors my review.

The first two thirds of the film follow a group of Catholic school boys -most of whom look to be in their mid twenties with receding hairlines- and their families, observing their caricaturized machismo behavior and sexual frustration through a bleak lens, portraying all of them as shady, violent deviants in the making. The director seems to be making the argument that all the boys are capable of the crime by showing us glimpses of their toxic bro culture and unsavory views on women, but it's done in such a broad way that we never really engage with any character in particular. One boy narrates the film, but there is no real protagonist and nobody to root for, bar the two female victims who appear in the final 30 mins.

Many of the plot points feel random and irrelevant to the over-arching narrative. For example, a lot of time is spent setting up one of the boys as being gay, but this never leads to anything. In another scene there is a traumatic accident involving the narrator's younger sister, but it just comes and goes without a sense of why this event is significant, or what imprint it has left on the characters.

The final third is a drawn out re-enactment of how three of the boys lure two young women to a house, imprison, rape and murder one of them. It's disturbing and believably acted, but my lack of context led me to feel like it came out of nowhere. The ending left me with a hollow feeling and while I appreciate it brought the victim's true story to my attention, the film didn't convince me of any of the sub textual points it was making about religion or masculinity. It was overall very scattered and confused.

This movie is primarily meant as a rendition of a true murder and rape case, committed by some high school teens back in the seventies in Italy. But that story only pops up in the last 20 minutes of the movie. Before that we get to see a whole string of side-stories, all more or less around the various scholars of a chic catholic high school. I didn't quite grasp how all these stories should relate to the crime (apart from the fact that they mostly circle around the sexual curiosity of all those teens). A voice-over by one of the schoolboys constantly utters vague, unfathomable and pretentious profundities, of which it's equally unclear what the link with the crime is. The title of the movie seems to suggest that the fact that the school is catholic is essential to all the goings-on, but this is nowhere in the movie made concrete.

The sequence of the rapes and murder is pretty harsh and realistically done, with the two boys blood chillingly cold and almost clinical in their actions. This part of the movie is impressive, albeit hard to watch. But the motivation or reasons for the actions by the two are never revealed, these in fact came (at least to me) totally out of the blue. After more than an hour preliminary movie-time building-up to this climax, this is at least a bit disappointing.

To me this is at best an intriguing movie about a gruesome and senseless crime. And the settings to revive the 70's are flawlessly done. But there's too much that distracts from the pivotal story, which makes this an unbalanced and in the end disappointing movie.

La scuola cattolica is a bad film that mistreats a story that should have been handled with more care, or rather, that exploits it to gain more visibility. The film has nothing to say and, in an attempt to hide it, it crumples over an empty and confusing structure accompanied by a narrator's voice blurting out what appear to be introspective profundities. As an Italian, I already knew this case, and hoped it would be treated with more justice, as an attempt to really understand why what happened happened, and to give a voice to the victims of the case. Instead, it is not clear what the director wants to do, other than displaying a gratuitous attempt to shock, some vague form of social polemic, and pointless observations on religion.

At first, there was nothing much to it. It was all about just boys experiencing sex for the first time. And then it became very sinister. I wish they had things explained a little bit more clearly because I could not really understand what was going on at the beginning. However towards the end, it became pretty clear. Acting was great and the cinematography was excellent. But I still feel like they could have made storyline more simpler, so it wouldn't confuse the audience. Specially going back and forth in time, was unnecessary because it did pretty much nothing to make the movie more interesting other than confusing. I guess that's why most people felt like they were watching some random Clips. This movie had potential to be excellent unfortunately it failed to deliver. 6 out of 10 for me!