Romanzo Criminale

So I've had the flu for the past week or so, which is unpleasant, but it afforded me the chance to watch a lot of television without having to feel too guilty about wasting time. After some false starts (a tedious BBC documentary about the Incas, science shows for kids...) I started enjoying myself by re-watching Lone Star, for the umpteeth time — the great John Sayles film about a small Texas town and its cross-generational secrets. You know: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." But with cowboy hats.

Then I found Romanzo Criminale, an Italian dramatic TV series, based on real events, about small-time hoodlums who, in the late seventies, somehow managed to take over the Roman drug trade and rackets for a while. Everybody has a shag hairdo and wears polyester suits; everyone talks broodily into fat phones with straight cords and drives teeny-tiny cars recklessly; they argue in Italian, shoot each other, and fuck with excitable abandon. The main characters are three down-and-out sociopaths, who team up to kidnap this rich guy to obtain a ransom, and then from there, gradually take over the Roman underworld — with a backdrop of social unrest, political manipulation, and terrorism (both left-wing and neo-fascist) that characterized the anni di piombo. It's quite well made as a period drama, and it gives you a good sense of what it must have been like living in Italy back then. It also gives you the usual satifaction that you get from gangster films: the sense of hightened life-or-death drama, the guilty pleasure of identifying with characters who feel free to casually stab or beat people up, and the catharsis of capriciously switching allegiance again to rejoice in their destruction, which restores the social balance.

I keep blowing my nose, or find I need to go to the bathroom just as something important is about to happen... Che pasticcio!