The original sin in the inertia of the film. The Catholic school by Stefano Mordini the adaptation for the cinema of Edoardo Albinati’s kilometric bestseller, winner of the Strega prize in 2016, a reconstruction of that part of Rome where the Circeo crime took place. Mordini interested above all in the context of the crime, to the degenerate, strabigotto, torpid environment of private vices and public virtues that generated the massacre. But he cannot help but also tell the tragic ending. It creates an imbalance, especially in the specific weight of the characters, which does not help the film and makes it inert, scattered and difficult to follow for those who are not already aware of the events. The ban on minors under the age of 18 closely related to this lameness.
The motivation of the measure says that The Catholic school comes to equate victim and executioner. Cos: The protagonists of the story, although starting from different social situations, all end up appearing unable to understand the situation in which they find themselves involved. The reference to a moral sensitivity that in the last twenty minutes does not shield the violence of the story and makes it ambiguous.
It all happened in the night between 29 and 30 September 1975.
Two girls from the suburbs, out of the loop of the bourgeois and wealthy neighborhoods, Rosaria Lopez (Federica Torchetti) and Donatella Colasanti (Benedetta Porcaroli), were kidnapped and tortured for hours by a group of young sadists who attended a Roman Catholic institution: Angelo Izzo, Andrea Ghira and Gianni Guido, all then punished with life imprisonment but never truly repent.
One of the girls, Rosaria, died as a result of the torture. The other was saved in extremis by pretending to be dead. Donatella Colasanti was found in the trunk of the car of one of the kidnappers: she lived tormented by the memory of the horror she suffered and died at the age of 47 of a tumor. Mordini in the first part insists on the school attended by the boys, the families, the corrupted relationships with classmates, the bullies and sexual prey, the fearful or inflexible authorities, the mother who gets along with minors, the very fascist father, the aphasic schoolboy who praises Hitler, the professor who teaches to read art by fueling vulgar morbidity of the schoolchildren, the progressive but too casual priest.
In the second part, however, Mordini describes the crime. In the film there is a character called Edoardo: and the narrator, the point of observation of the story. Tab, tic, bullying. Physical education lessons, the blunder of privileges, initiation rites. Symbols and cultural sophisms of the time are accompanied by the songs of Lucio Battisti. Killers are more psychopaths than militants.
A portrait emerges of a world that, pretending security and virility, feared sex but was attracted to it to the point of obsession. Where women became bodies to be dominated and violence was the order of the day. But no political sign enters history, all taken for granted. And there are few captions to remember the sensational news story to those who, like Mordini himself, were too young in the seventies. Overall, many characters are poorly calibrated and this takes away the strength and authenticity of the reconstruction of events. With all this, The Catholic school a choral film, even generous but not in depth. Many well-known faces of the cast: Riccardo Scamarcio, Valentina Cervi, Jasmine Trinca, Fabrizio Gifuni, Valeria Golino.
THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL by Stefano Mordini
(Italy, 2021, duration 106 ‘)
with Benedetta Porcaroli, Riccardo Scamarcio, Jasmine Trinca, Fabrizio Gifuni, Valentina Cervi, Valeria Golino, Corrado Invernizzi
Rating: ** 1/2 his 5
In the halls
9 October 2021 | 08:10
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