Jimmy della collina

I recently saw this at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. In this drama from Italy Jimmy (Nicola Adamo) lives in a Sardinian refinery town where the refinery is your life after high school unless you leave town. Jimmy is almost 18 and hates his existence and decides to embark on a life of crime as a bank robber against the advice of a local barfly who claims that he was once a career bank robber. Jimmy assembles a couple of other discontented teenage friends but their plan goes wrong and Jimmy is sentenced to three years in a juvenile hall detention center instead of prison but the fortune of being just shy of his 18th birthday. There is cell mate is the obnoxious but friendly Simone (Federico Carta) and among the inmates Salvo (Giovanni Catarella) becomes Jimmy's Nemesis. A chance to go to a halfway house for low risk offenders is arranged through chaplain Don Ehore (Francesco Origo) and Jimmy is assigned to work under the watch of Claudia (Valentia Carnelutti) a female work release correctional officer. Enrico Pau directs the Antonia Laccarino screenplay adapted from the Massimo Carlotto novel. I found what may be an interesting premise to a story as dull and boring and by the end of the film I didn't care about Jimmy and just wanted the film to end. I did find the Simone character interesting and he was wonderfully portrayed by Carta but that was the only bright spot in this dreary little low budget drama. I would give this a 4.5 out of 10.

A young man can work in the town factory, an oil refinery, and have a salary, as his girlfriend, father, and brother do. Or? But what Or is there? To imagine blowing the factory up? He could be a charmer. A prostitute tells him he looks good (and Nicola Adamo does). Or--there's crime, which for him doesn't work out. Incarceration is a kind of factory; partial liberation is to a labor camp. But Jimmy's lack of an Or is set deeper. He can't relate to other people, he can't account for himself. The Or would be sheer release, which he may conceive of as escaping. I don't know thenovel by Massimo Carlotto, but I'd like to know where it ends. I also don't have enough philosophy to describe Jimmy's alienation. The stronglife-hardened woman played by Valentina Carneletti could offer him an alternative path. Or religion, of which there is rather much. More than once, Jimmy runs the wrong way down the stairs.

OK, not a big movie like "Gomorra" (but more inward about crime). Bare, but also not self-indulgent like "Io sono amore."