How much weight does a religious education carry on moral choices, when a group of privileged high school seniors are given the opportunity to do evil? In director Stefano Mordini’s The Catholic School (La scuola cattolica), the influence of a Catholic education by priests and monks seems, if anything, to negatively affect the moral development of its students. It’s a paradoxical conclusion and not at all convincing in a film that elides social and historical analysis and lays an uncomfortable amount of the responsibility on school and family for a terrible true crime: a double rape and murder perpetrated by three boys from one of Rome’s most elite institutions.
Unfortunately, the film emerges as a pale shadow of Edoardo Albinati’s 1,300-page book on which it is based, the winner of the prestigious 2016 Premio Strega. Perhaps two hours is too short a time for the screenwriters to capture the author’s perceptive, wide-ranging first-person reflections on Italy’s violent “years of lead”, when political violence mixed with class warfare, social injustice and Catholic moralism to create a society falling apart at the seams. The book shows how this atmosphere of moral decline evidenced itself in a graduating class of high school seniors from privileged Roman families, but that is just part of what it is saying.
From Albinati’s many ruminations, Mordini’s film takes only the most obvious and rudimentary. A sprawling ensemble cast includes Italo stars Valeria Golino, Riccardo Scamarcio, Valentina Cervi and Jasmine Trinca as parents in various stages of bourgeois moral decay, fingered for their bad examples more than anything else. Trinca plays an former movie actress who has an affair with her son’s classmate; Scamarcio gets his boy out of hot water by reminding the principal he’s a big donor to the school, and so on. Other narrated events, like the death of a child, seem completely extraneous to the film’s theme.
The time is 1975 and, according to the narrator Edoardo (played by serious, fresh-faced newcomer Emanuele Maria Di Stefano), it was a year when violence was in the air. He’s one of the more normal kids in his Catholic high school. Mordini and his cowriters Massimo Gaudioso and Luca Infascelli spend a lot of screen time introducing the senior class and their wealthy families, time that seems to a large extent wasted, as the many faces and names never really gel. A quick impression is that there are many bullies and a few gay kids who are their victims, along with any schoolgirl who happens along.
Certainly, educating sexually repressed boys bursting with testosterone and the excitement of approaching adulthood is no walk in the park. But the mumbo-jumbo about evil spouted by a charismatic teacher, played by a devilishly debonair Fabrizio Gifune, shows how lacking their religiously inspired education is in clear thought. Not all the boys agree with the teacher’s assessment that one can only know evil by taking part in it, but some apparently take the lesson to heart.
One day two girls from a lower class neighborhood, Donatella (Benedetta Porcaroli) and Nadia, ask one of the boys for a lift in his fancy car. He drops them off and takes their phone number, which gets passed around the school. Since any Italian viewer knows what happens next, it’s just a matter of waiting for the subplots to die down so the three killers can get down to business. Their drive to Circeo with Donatella and her friend Rosaria (Federica Torchetti) for a party in a seaside villa belonging to one of the boys’ families is the chilling prelude to torture and rape. Mordini wisely leaves the worst of the violence off-screen, but the sight of the naked, beaten girls being mocked by their naked tormentors is harrowing enough.
Besides the angel-faced Di Stefano in the role of the narrator, young actor Luca Vergoni stands out as Angelo Izzo, the unrepentant killer with curly blond locks and a face of evil. Young Porcaroli adds to her acting credits as the unfortunate Donatella. The film has very few light moments, but a memorable one is a Lucio Battisti song she and Nadia light-heartedly sing in the rich boy’s car on their first innocent meeting.
Director: Stefano Mordini
Screenplay: Massimo Gaudioso, Luca Infascelli, Stefano Mordini from a novel by Edoardo Albinati
Cast: Benedetta Porcaroli, Giulio Pranno, Emanuele Maria Di Stefano, Giulio Fochetti, Leonardo Ragazzini, Valentina Cervi, Riccardo Scamarcio, Valeria Golino, Jasmine Trinca
Producer: Roberto Sessa
Executive producer: Chiara Grassi
Cinematography: Luigi Martinucci
Production design: Paolo Bonfini
Costume design: Grazia Materia
Editing: Massimo Fiocchi, Michelangelo Garrone
Music: Andrea Guerra
Sound: Francesco LiotardProduction companies: Warner Bros Entertainment Italia, Pico Media (Italy)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (out of competition)
In Italian
106 minutes
