Vallanzasca – Gli angeli del male
Michele Placido (2010)
Renato Vallanzasca, according to Wikipedia, ‘is a notorious Italian mobster … a local celebrity in Milan, famous for appealing to part of the public opinion for his image linked to “the myth of the bandit”‘. (A translation, I think!) When I read about Angels of Evil, it suggested an Italian Mesrine. Having spent five hours two years ago watching Jean-François Richet’s two Mesrine films, I was half-hearted about this one, directed by Michele Placido from a screenplay he co-wrote with the star, Kim Rossi Stuart (and others), based on a book by Vallanzasca (and others). I think I went to see Angels of Evil mainly for the sake of ensuring I saw something at the cinema this week and it was a wasted journey; I walked out after half an hour and I spent some of that drowsing. I’d seen enough, though – enough blunt violence and bloodshed, enough for it to be clear that Angels of Evil was, like the Richet films but more crudely, all about the glamorisation of Renato Vallanzasca. Michele Placido is telling us that, if we find Vallanzasca magnetic, that goes to show how irresistible this kind of figure can be – enables us to understand Vallanzasca’s fan base in Milan. This is disingenuous, to put it mildly. Placido has a lead actor who is ‘charismatic’ in the most obvious way. Kim Rossi Stuart is tall, dark and handsome, with remarkably blue eyes. He holds the screen but it’s hard to tell if he can act because he and Placido are more concerned with the idea of Vallanzasca than with characterisation. They could claim, of course, that their approach reflects that of the Italian media of the time (the 1970s seem to have been Vallanzasca’s celebrity criminal heyday). But what’s the point of yet another demonstration that people can be seduced by the manipulation of images? There are some good people in the cast – Filippo Timi, Moritz Bleibtreu – but I didn’t hang around long enough to see them.
2 June 2011
