A Cinematic View Of Italy As Morally Bankrupt

MILAN, Nov. 20 — The lunchtime patter of a group of businessmen during the first few frames of A Casa Nostra (In Our House) neatly encapsulates the mindset of Italian capitalism as envisioned by the director Francesca Comencini. The men chat about food, soccer, insider trading.

The director Francesca Comencini, in cap, on the set of her new film, “A Casa Nostra,” which depicts Italy as a nation that is selling its soul.

Giuseppe Battiston and Laura Chiatti in “A Casa Nostra.”

The scene sets the tone. A Casa Nostra is essentially a film about money, about what it can buy and what people will do to get their hands on it (out of necessity or greed), whether it is selling their bodies, their possessions or their souls.

It is also about Italy today as the director sees it, a cinematic final curtain on the capitalist myth and this countrys transmutation from postwar prosperity to the widespread venality she says has taken root in the national soul.

The indictment, though harsh, takes no sides. Its a political film, but not an ideological one, Ms. Comencini said during an interview in Rome, where she lives. Today money is at the heart of contemporary Italian culture, and people think thats normal.

But with that comes an inexorable barbarization of everyday life, she added, and the loss of values that may be difficult to recover once theyre gone.

The title also plays on the notion of Cosa Nostra, the name given to the Sicilian Mafia, to convey the sense of a group of criminals plundering the countrys financial and ethical resources.

Italy, she believes, has misplaced its moral compass. This is evinced in the film by a kaleidoscopic interplay of story lines that center on the main plot, which involves rigging the financial markets to take over a bank. The story seems lifted straight from the recent front pages of any Italian newspaper.

The movie could have been set anywhere, Ms. Comencini said, but Milan was the obvious choice for a film about money because it is Italys financial capital.

The choice of setting caused a series of polemics even before the film opened in Italy in early November. Mayor Letizia Moratti of Milan disdainfully dismissed it. Milan is far more than what Comencinis film would depict it to be, she said on a national news television broadcast. Milan is much more beautiful. She offered viewers a statistical tour of Milans merits: 80,000 people who do volunteer social work; 10,000 tickets a year sold to cultural events; 40 percent of Italys scientific patents are developed in this city.

But some people, like the journalist Gianni Barbacetto, the films adviser on the intricacies of recent Italian corruption scandals, interpret the criticism as an act of love for the city by telling things as they are.

Though reviews have been almost unanimously positive, a smattering of catcalls greeted the movies first public screening at the Rome Film Festival last month. These were prompted, suggested Paolo Mereghetti, the film critic for the Milan daily Corriere Della Sera, by the perplexity of seeing a film thats out of place in the Italian panorama, far from the facile, flowery and allegorical folklore that seems to be the only language accepted in the cinema and in television, where everything is excessively spelled out, excessively shown off, excessively forced. After a diet of lighthearted comedies poking fun at the national character, Italians are not used to having their dark side laid bare.

Operatic arias by Verdi are the films soundtrack, underscoring the melodramatic counterpoint of intersecting story lines that play off the antagonism between an unscrupulous banker and the police officer trying to unravel his unlawful dealings.

If some of the dialogue seems familiar, that is because it sounds like the transcripts of wiretaps in newspaper accounts of real-life dirty deals and scandals.

Francesca wanted to decant reality into something that wasnt a documentary, said Mr. Barbacetto, who has covered many Italian corruption scandals for Il Diario magazine. At the same time, she wanted to make a film that went beyond current events.

A result is the depiction of a society mired in moral ambiguity and selective law abidance. History shows, Ms. Comencini said, that Italians have always had a highhanded relationship with rules and legality and an ambiguous relationship with democracy. But in the past, institutions like the Roman Catholic Church and the strongly ideological political parties in Italy helped keep individual ambitions in check.

Whats new is the money, she said. And, especially during the last 20 years, the idea that its O.K. to use power and rules for personal profit.

A second, equally powerful leitmotif concerns maternity and the inability to procreate, and this too is a direct reference to real life: Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in the world.

Our fertility rate is low because Italy is desperate without knowing it, Ms. Comencini said. It is hedonistic, but not happy. She added, You have to sense that a moral cradle exists before you go about having children.

If Italy has a royal family of cinema, Ms. Comencini is part of it. During a career that spanned nearly six decades, her father, Luigi Comencini, directed some of Italys most memorable and gentle comedies. Her sister Paola is one of Italys best-known screenwriters; another, Cristina, directed a film, La Bestia Nel Cuore (Dont Tell), that was nominated for best foreign film at the 2006 Academy Awards.

Never one to shirk from telling a tough tale, Francesca Comencini directed earlier feature films that focused on harassment in the workplace and on the death of a 23-year-old antiglobalization protester at the G-8 summit meeting in Genoa, Italy, in 2001. But A Casa Nostra exudes a particular sense of urgency, as if Ms. Comencini believed that time was running out for Italian society.

This is also our house, said the actress Valeria Golino, who plays the police officer, when confronting the banker with his moral bankruptcy.

But this is no straightforward morality tale. There is no happy ending, only lots of loose ends.

Italy has lost, but doesnt know it, Ms. Comencini said. Thats why a film like this is necessary, so people can become aware.

In her mind, however, it may already be too late, because there are some things that once you lose them, you dont get them back.

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