Rated: MA15+
Directed by: Damiano D’Innocenzo, Fabio D’Innocenzo
Screenplay by: “D’Innocenzo Brothers”
Produced by: Agustino Giuseppe, Maria Grazia Sacca
Director of photography: Paolo Carnera
Starring: Luca Zingaretti, Andrea Carpenzano, Matteo Olivetti, Milena Mancini, Massimiliano Tortora.
Winner of Best First Film at the 2018 Nastri d’Argento Awards
Manolo (Andrea Carpenzano) and Mirko (Matteo Olivetti) have been through primary and high school together. They have girlfriends and dead-end jobs delivering pizza.
When Mirko accidently runs down a guy, killing him, Manolo tells him to keep going – his dad will know what to do.
From that moment their lives change. An accidental hit and run that happens to take out a snitch of the mafia makes them think they’ve won the lottery when the accident ends in an induction into the mafia – going from zero to a thousand in a moment making a rags to riches change in their lives.
All they have to do is kill and pimp out underage girls.
Mirko’s girlfriend asks, ‘If you and me broke up would you cry?’
When he doesn’t answer she says, ‘I would’.
Boys Cry isn’t about Manolo and Mirko crying, it’s about a sickness that slowly eats away their lives until there’s nothing left.
The film is blunt and at times boring, like life. Even down to a mafia henchman making sauce on the same stove-top as a bubbling concoction of drugs: the every-day in the setting of crime making the crime seem every-day.
Boys Cry isn’t a fast-paced thriller, yet it was hard to look away as these two young guys waste their lives and sell their soul because they don’t realise what they’re giving away.
It’s a comment on the value of life. Where the reaction to wrong isn’t emotional but a physical sickness. Where empathy is replaced with ambition.
When a high-risk job comes up the Captain of the mafia knows the stupidity of asking the new recruits to complete what really should be done by an experienced killer. But what have they got to lose? Two kids? Slowly turning into psychos?
Some of the camera work gets creative, focussing on the eyes; panning above to show a map of attack, to distance the action only to grip when the action is filmed inside – simple yet effective.
But the film is driven by dialogue, by the conversation between the two friends as they descend into a space where they cease to feel.