PERICLE IL NERO - (Stefano Mordini, 2016)
Pericle Scalzone (Riccardo Scamarcio) is a Neapolitan immigrant in Liège. Since he was a child, he has been protected by the local Camorra boss, Don Luigi (Gigio Morra), who uses him to humiliate those who don't pay the protection money, sodomizing them and kicking them ("I kick people's asses," he says in the text). When one day he accidentally injures the elderly sister of a powerful local boss, he is forced to flee to Calais, where he meets the baker Anastasia (Marina Foïs). With her, he begins a new, decent life, but there are those who want him back…
Based on the boook by Giuseppe Ferrandino (a novel which had also been considered by Abel Ferrara), this highly interesting film is a modern and unusual Italian noir. Its structure features: a traditional convincing "femme fatale" (Valentina Acca, who plays the daughter of the Camorra boss), an evil victim-hero who (contrary to typical film noir motifs) redeems himself in the finale, and a staging inspired by a more realist cinematic tradition, with a clear intent of social commentary. Scamarcio, also a producer, works well in the first half, playing a bitter and violent character reduced to a mere sex machine and stunned by constant drug abuse (both to sodomize debtors and due to his porn work), but he fails to shift gears for the final twist, in which he is supposed to take control of events thanks to the recovery of a lost family memory. One might suspect that the European auteur-style packaging (with the Dardenne brothers also co-producing the film) makes the film less than convincing, in the way in which, after showing Pericles' sordid reality, it asks us to accept his "impossible" redemption.
