Adagio

Adagio

Pierfrancesco Favino

VERDICT: Stefano Sollima delivers the kind of gritty, testosterone-driven underworld drama we’ve come to expect, boasting exceptional performances and location work, but a highly problematic undercurrent of homophobia can’t be brushed under the soiled carpet.

Is it worse if your son gives blow jobs for money, or if he deals cocaine?

For the lowlifes in Stefano Sollima’s gritty, tense Adagio, the former is far worse, but is that also the director’s point of view? That’s the big problem with this otherwise engrossing film, and even though it forms a relatively small plot point, it’s hard to get around the clear homophobia, especially in Italy which boasts one of the worst LGBTQ records in Western Europe (and it’s not getting better). Setting that aside for the moment – it will be addressed more fully below – Adagio is what we’ve come to expect from Sollima (Suburra, Without Remorse), returning to Italy after a Hollywood stint with his talent for testosterone-filled violent underworld tales fully intact. Reteaming with Pierfrancesco Favino, who remains one of the country’s most fearless actors, Sollima delivers an amazing looking, dread-filled story about a young guy forced to seek help from his dad’s old gangster pals when he gets caught up with a bunch of dirty cops. Audiences who don’t care about the queer panic element – and let’s face it, that’s the majority – will enjoy the macho ride.

Everyone in Adagio is trapped, not just in their restless lives but literally their environment: the apartment windows all have cage-like bars, and there’s a major fire blazing through the night on Rome’s outskirts, seen in an exceptional drone shot that opens the film. Manuel (Gianmarco Franchini) has the swagger of his lower middle-class neighborhood but he’s also solicitous towards his father Mario, aka Daytona (Toni Servillo), suffering from mild dementia. The kid heads to the city center and enters a spectacular queer party where he’s on a mission: to film a government minister dressed in drag snorting coke and giving or getting oral sex. The party is a decadent fantasy full of half-naked gyrating twinks, but when Manuel realizes there are other hidden cameras besides his own, and is ordered to lure the minister into a fellatio session, he freaks out and bails.

That doesn’t sit well with the dirty cops who put him up to the job. Vasco (Adriano Giannini) is their leader, a single dad with two teenage sons whose fatherly attentiveness is the flip side to his viciousness. He’s watching from his ipad at home while colleagues Bruno (Francesco Di Leva) and Massimo (Lorenzo Adorni) tail Manuel, foolishly still carrying the phone they gave him. Unsure who to turn to, the kid goes to his father’s blind former gangster buddy Pol Niùman (Valerio Mastrandrea, a very fine actor but not exactly Paul Newman) and tells him the story: he was caught dealing cocaine, and these cops promised they’d make it go away if he agreed to entrap the minister at the party. What he leaves out, and is only revealed after, is that Manuel was actually caught giving blow jobs for money, an act so beyond the pale that later on Vasco taunts Daytona saying “if a son acts like that, it means his father is a piece of shit.”

Just before getting an unfriendly visit from Vasco, Pol Niùman sends the kid to another old colleague, Romeo, aka the Camel (Pierfrancesco Favino, hairless and almost unrecognizable), who slams the door in his face, saying that Daytona is the reason why his own son died and why he was sent up the river for twelve years. Though this is news to Manuel, he still hangs around out of desperation until Romeo, curious to understand what exactly is going on, agrees to do the minimum, much to the fury of the jailbird’s long-suffering wife Silvia (Silvia Salvatori, excellent in a small, stereotyped role). What follows is a cat and mouse game, with the corrupt cops looking to kill Manuel while Romeo tries to figure out what to do, largely because the kid looks like his dead son. Daytona also comes back into the picture, his dementia partly a self-protection gimmick.

Even though the final shootout makes little sense, and the script (written by Stefano Bises and Sollima) has a fair amount of holes, the director keeps everything bubbling away and it never loses interest. That’s partly due to the strength of the performances – Favino’s altered physicality adds tremendous depth to the character – but also Paolo Carnera’s muscular camerawork and Paki Meduri’s notable production design (both are Sollima’s regular collaborators). One of the admirable things about Adagio is the location work, with most of the apartments squeezed against ancient aqueducts or in kissing distance of major flyovers: it’s like the buildings themselves are pushed into a corner and the residents unimportant organisms crushed by far more solid infrastructure. Add to that the intense heat of a brutal Roman summer plus the fire ravaging the periphery, and the sense of entrapment reaches claustrophobia levels.

But then there’s the homophobia issue. Manuel flees the licentious party because cameras may capture him performing oral sex, which is what got him into trouble in the first place. It’s the old gay panic defense, which the script could have done something interesting with but instead the writers make a point of underlining Vasco’s loving father behavior – his redemption – versus Daytona’s admitted lack of deep affection for Manuel. In other words, Vasco’s two boys would never in a million years betray their father’s masculinity by having sex with a man, but Manuel, son of an uncaring father, isn’t above going down on his knees for a little cash. It would have been so easy for Bises and Sollima to temper this kind of toxic message but instead they pretend a neutrality which, in an Italian context, betrays any attempt to distance themselves from the argument.

It’s a real shame, as in many ways Adagio is a robust atmospheric thriller that cleverly takes advantage of lesser-known areas of Rome. As usual in Sollima’s films, there are real visual stand-out moments, such as a shot through a windscreen of ash and charred paper floating down from the sky, which imperceptibly shifts to birds fleeing the conflagration. Together with a strong premise and top-notch cast, the film has so much to offer, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore a highly problematic undercurrent.

 

Director: Stefano Sollima
Screenplay: Stefano Bises, Stefano Sollima
Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Toni Servillo, Valerio Mastandrea, Adriano Giannini, Gianmarco Franchini, Francesco Di Leva, Lorenzo Adorni, Silvia Salvatori
Producers: Lorenzo Mieli, Stefano Sollima
Executive producers: Gianfranco Barbagallo, Elena Recchia
Cinematography: Paolo Carnera
Production designer: Paki Meduri
Costume designer: Mario Tufano
Editing: Matthew Newman
Music: Subsonica
Sound: Maricetta Lombardo
Production companies: The Apartment Pictures (Italy), AlterEgo (Italy), Vision Distribution (Italy), in collaboration with Sky, Netflix
World sales: Vision Distribution
Venue: Venice (competition)
In Italian
126 minutes