Cinema Made in Italy 2023; Spaccaossa (The Bone Breakers)

Directed by Vincenzo Pirrotta

Cinema Made in Italy’s array of new films, a selection we may not get the chance to see elsewhere in the UK this year, found a larger audience at London’s Ciné Lumière than in last year’s Covid-anxious spring – we’re getting used to going to the pictures again! Of the five I was able to see, however, the two standouts which book-ended my visit, Notte Fantasma on Friday and Spaccaossa on Sunday, happened to attract the smallest crowds. They also provided extremely lively Q&As.

Maybe the Sunday teatime slot was always going to struggle to get bums on seats this time, but hopefully  SPACCAOSSA (The Bone Breakers) will get the release in art houses around the country it strongly deserves.  

This horrifying film tells of a low-grade gangster scam whereby the dirt poor of Palermo volunteer to have a leg or arm broken for insurance, of which a good proportion is paid back to those who fix the procedure for them.  Bound by a web of poverty themselves the various foot soldiers gather friends and acquaintances to the scheme, getting a hand-out themselves for the introduction. Further up the pyramid are the ones who do the breaking, paid a higher tranche of the money, the nurses who stay shtum for a cut, and at the top the capo with a degree, a glamorous wife and a nice flat, who does little other than make the rules and scrape in the money.   

Opening with a horrifying scene which at first glance has the composition and lighting of a religious painting or one of those high-minded Victorian portrayals of the nobility of labour, we soon realise that this is something we don’t really want to watch, as the bone-breaking set-up improvised in a dirty warehouse from scaffolding and a caseful of weights, does its work. Afterwards an almost-non-compliant wife scrubs away what she can of the blood, echoing the words of Lady Macbeth – no one will really ever be clean of this business.

With the camera we roam in almost documentary fashion the shitty streets of the city that no tourists see, the lovely bulk of Monte Pellegrino sometimes glimpsed beyond this hellhole, and become acquainted with its various citizens, including addict teenager Luisa (Selena Carramazza) who becomes our moral compass, taken under the wing (and later the sheets) of central figure Vincenzo (played by the director and co-writer Vincenzo Pirrotta), a bone breaker who still seems to have some humanity about him.

 Vincenzo lives with his mother, a superficially sweet old lady, who reveals as a monster in front of our eyes and is the malign force behind the fall from grace of her son, which provides the moral tipping point of the film. She’s played by the wonderful veteran Aurora Quattrocchi, busy on stage, film and TV for over 50 years, and whom I happen to have now seen 3 times in the last 2 weeks: additionally as the dying mother in Nostalgia, and as a kindly grandma in L’Immensita seen here at CMI 2 days earlier.  

This is  Pirrotta’s film directing debut – he’s already a renowned stage director – but unlike so many who cannot help but bring a staginess with them, he seems to have a natural grasp of cinematic fluidity, and there are many moments of both bravura and small-scale moments of powerful effect, from the contrapuntal scenes of arranged violence set against Vincenzo’s mother telling her rosary (bringing to mind the baptism scene from Godfather), to the affecting vision of one of the innocent victims as he trundles his pitiful barrow of salt for sale shouting his wares and disappearing from the camera like the nobody he is treated as, later bound for the ghastly warehouse and worse.

The shocking thing about this story is that it is based on fact, as detailed at the end of the film. A thrilling Q&A followed with Pirrotta passionately enraged at the moral degradation brought by poverty in his home city, bringing spontaneous applause from his audience. It’s a painful watch but demands to be seen.

See also Notte fantasma

The Eight Mountains