Toxic Love

A group of young people in Ostia, the seaside district of Rome. Their day is a single loop: find money, find the dealer, take the shot, wait. Cesare and Michela are together, and their relationship runs inside the same loop: instead of sleeping together they wait their turn, instead of talking they argue about where to score. Nobody gets out over the course of the film, and nobody tries. The film presents heroin as neither crime nor tragedy but as dull, repetitive, mechanical work. That monotony is the most striking thing about it: every trace of the drug's glamour has been removed. Claudio Caligari directed. The entire cast is amateur, most of them addicts or former addicts, and the speech, the slang and the movements are their own. Many died of heroin or aids in the years that followed. It screened at the 40th Venice Film Festival and won the De Sica Award. Who it is for: anyone interested in Italian social realism and in films that document the heroin wave of the eighties. Who it is not for: anyone unable to watch needles and use. The film shows them at length and directly, the plot is almost nonexistent, and the repetition is exhausting by design.