VENICE — A marginal, peripheral Rome, little known and rarely seen, is evoked in Serpenti, directed by Roberto De Paolis Maino and written by Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo. The capital, with its grotesque, sad, ruthless and distinctive soul, metaphorically permeates the entire story of this dark comedy about a femicide. Leonardo Lidi, Alessandro Borghi, Pietro Castellitto, Valeria Golino and Daniele Parisi play the characters who are both deeply real and highly improbable. The film was presented at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in the Spotlight section.
Paolo Marra (Leonardo Lidi) is an ordinary man, an electrician, who has just killed his wife. Riddled with guilt and the desire to redeem himself through punishment, he goes to a nearby police station to turn himself in. Here, however, things do not go quite as he imagined. In a sleepy, unfocussed environment, marked by a listlessness that is at once bewildering, irritating and amusing, the few police officers on duty seem more bored by Marra’s shocking confession than interested in addressing the tragedy. Paolo meets two officers (Daniele Parisi and Alessandro Borghi), who treat him with the most grotesque and Kafkaesque indifference imaginable, approaching his case as if it were no different to one of their many bureaucratic tasks. Even with the diligent court-appointed lawyer (Pietro Castellitto) assigned to him by the police, the matter seems to be reduced to a surreal and sophisticated intellectual exercise. Only a fortune teller (Valeria Golino), whom he happens to encounter at the police station, provides an outlet for the uncontrollable, almost insane, eruption of his anger. “I don’t think there was any intention on our part to make social satire. We wanted to tell a story that felt real to us. We took these characters and the story we were telling very seriously, starting from the premise that reality is paradoxical and grotesque, that it is absurd,” the D’Innocenzo brothers said in Venice.
The Rome of Serpenti is rarely shown but deeply felt. It is present in the disenchanted, cynical and listless attitude of the two officers, in the lawyer’s arrogant cunning, and the fortune teller’s streetwise morality. These are all characters who are perfectly at ease within the environments imagined by the D’Innocenzo brothers and De Paolis for the story. “This entire story unfolds within a metaphorical setting — the police station is a kind of microcosmic model of society — where a man who has killed his wife tries, unsuccessfully, to turn himself in. The protagonist’s story is a clear snapshot of how many men, within the cultural tradition of our ‘old world,’ have been treated after killing or abusing women: as though they had done nothing,” explains director Roberto De Paolis Maino.
A few locations, in a grey and indolent suburban Rome, make an appearance. The former Sibilla Aleramo vocational institute, now a branch of the Croce-Aleramo high school, at 967 Via Tiburtina in the Rebibbia area, served as the setting for the police station. Carrying the full weight of his drama and his unheard guilt, Paolo Marra goes to a shop in the commercial area of Via Palombini, also in Rebibbia. Blinded by delirium, the man crosses the street featuring the famous mural of giant ants on Via di Valleranello, in the southern outskirts of Rome.
Produced by Paco Cinematografica and Be Water Film, Serpenti arrives in Italian cinemas on September 10, distributed by Be Water Film in collaboration with Europictures.