To Die for Tano

Tano Guarrasi, a Palermo mobster, is shot in his own butcher shop in 1988. The people who shot him are from a rival clan. He leaves behind his wife, four unmarried sisters and his daughter. The women mourn him, but in truth the death is a kind of release for them. The film tells this not as a lament but as a musical. Songs and dances are laid over the mafia story. The account neither romanticises the mafia nor makes a tragedy of it; it makes it ridiculous. The eighty minutes turn around a single funeral. What sits at the centre of the story is the women swinging between mourning and relief. Ciccio Guarino and Mimma De Rosalia are among the cast of Roberta Torre’s Italian film, completed in 1997.