A spicy blend of social realism, boisterous comedy and caustic political satire, Palazzina Laf is based on a bizarre real case of mass bullying at a notorious steelworks in Taranto, a coastal city tucked into the heel of Italy. The action takes place in the 1990s, though the film’s stylised period look and swashbuckling energy hark back to an earlier golden age of Italian cinema.
Palazzina Laf marks the directing debut of actor Michele Riondino, who also plays the lead role as Caterino Lamanna, a hot-headed factory worker lured into a Faustian pact by his bosses, trading low wages and perilous manual labour for promotion, better pay and a company car. In return he agrees to spy on his troublesome colleagues, union activists and strike leaders, reporting anything suspicious back to management. Riondino paints these events in broad slapstick strokes and garish colours, aesthetic choices which may grate with some viewers. But he also turns a fascinating, potentially grim true story into darkly funny and compelling drama. Already a prize-winning domestic release, this lusty workplace farce makes its Maltese debut this week at Mediterrane Film Festival.
The events depicted in Palazzina Laf still have newsy currency in Italy. In 2021 the former owners of the vast ILVA steelworks in Taranto, Fabio and Nicola Riva, were given long jail sentences for allowing their factory to emit deadly pollution for decades, turning the surrounding residential areas into a cancer hotspot and ecological disaster zone. Set in and around this vast industrial complex in 1997, Riondino’s film makes frequent reference to its poisonous effects on the nearby townsfolk. But the director is more focussed on a different chapter of the factory’s toxic culture, a sustained campaign of psychological harassment against various workers during a bumpy period of restructuring and privatisation, which culminated in Italy’s first ever legal prosecution for workplace “mobbing”.
Pursuing a bizarre policy of low-level collective intimidation, company mangers confine 79 employees deemed to be obstructive misfits to a prison-like block on the factory grounds, the eponymous Palazzina Laf, assigning them wages and job titles but no actual work to do. Officially, these outcasts are awaiting new positions after their previous jobs were dissolved, but in reality most lack the specialist skills for the dangerous tasks they are offered by their cynical bosses, who secretly hope they will just resign. Confined to this surreal Kafka-esque limbo, with heavy-handed company security guards acting as their jailers, these methodically demoralised non-workers begin to suffer mental health issues. When Lammana is sent in undercover as one of the inmates, the pressure cooker conditions within become explosive.
Riondino plays Lammana in a hyperbolic comic register, as a shameless opportunist with slicked-back hair, Borat moustache, slippery charm and bawdy sense of humour. But he never treats him as a pure monster, describing his anti-hero as both “a Judas and a poor Jesus”. Indeed, religious imagery figures prominently in this contemporary parable, most strikingly in a feverish dream sequence which blasts off the screen with percussive jump cuts and saturated colours. The real villain of the piece is his boss Basile (Elio Germano), a corporate assassin in sunglasses and designer stubble.
With its stylised period feel, old-school look and overheated comic tone, Palazzina Laf harks self-consciously back to classic Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. There are nods to Fellini’s wedding-cake exuberance here, plus hints of vintage Morricone in Teho Teardo’s brassy, bustling, knowingly nostalgic score. But the film’s most obvious ancestor is Elio Petri’s Cannes prize-winner The Working Class go to Heaven (1971), an irreverent social satire about a model factory worker radicalised by a workplace accident, transformed overnight from pliant management pet to angry leftist agitator.
Hosting the film’s Malta screening, Riondino spoke passionately about his personal connection to the Taranto steelworks, where his own father worked, describing himself an an “activist” as well as a film-maker. But Palazzina Laf is no worthy monochrome polemic, more a messy human story about the dubious moral choices, compromises and betrayals that ordinary people are forced to make at the sharp end of the class struggle. It ends on a powerful punch, with emotionally charged audio testimony from the real workers involved in this landmark case playing over a closing montage, accompanied by statistics that suggest the problem of mobbing in the workplace has since grown into an epidemic.
Director: Michele Riondino
Cast: Michele Riondino, Elio Germano, Vanessa Scalera, Domenico Fortunato, Gianni D’Addario, Michele Sinisi, Fulvio Pepe, Marina Limosani, Eva Cela, Anna Ferruzzo, Paolo Pierobon
Screenplay: Maurizio Braucci, Michele Riondino
Producers: Carlo Degli Esposti, Nicola Serra
Cinematography: Claudio Cofrancesco
Editing: Julien Panzarasa
Music: Teho Teardo
Production companies: Bravo (Italy), Palomar (Italy), Rai Cinema Italy), Paprika Films (France)
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (competition)
In Italian
99 minutes