The Scent of the Night

A former policeman from the Roman outskirts keeps up an ordinary daytime life and breaks into houses at night. His method is closer to torture than robbery: he holds families hostage in their own homes for hours, humiliates them and waits until money appears. Claudio Caligari made only three features, and this second one arrived fifteen years after the first. What separates it is the refusal to explain the man. No childhood wound, no critique to hang him on, no moment of redemption. Only boredom, vanity and a life narrowing around him. Valerio Mastandrea plays him without a single softening gesture. The story draws on a gang that really worked Rome in the 1980s, by way of a book by Dido Sacchettoni. It screened in the Critics' Week section of the fifty fifth Venice film festival. The difficulty is the rhythm. The crime repeats, progress is slow, and the violence is never shot to excite. That is the whole intention. Who it is for: the hard vein of Italian crime cinema. Who it is not for: viewers who need violence to mean something.