Good News

Elio Petri’s 1979 film turned out to be his last. Giancarlo Giannini plays an unnamed television executive who spends his working day watching six screens that carry nothing but attacks and disasters, and his evenings ignoring his wife. The monotony breaks when a friend he has not seen in fifteen years reappears, convinced that mysterious enemies have decided to kill him. Petri uses the paranoia as comedy and as diagnosis at the same time, and arrives somewhere nobody turns out to be right. Ángela Molina and Aurore Clément are in the cast and Ennio Morricone wrote the score. It is usually described as the film in which Petri’s pessimism stopped restraining itself.