Two Ways of Crossing December: From the Memory of I Cento Passi to the Affectionate Tale of Attitudini: Nessuna

Translated by Aurora Forlivesi

We return there, as we do every December. The last month of the year always confronts us with the urgency of closing deadlines and the illusion of a new beginning that lies ahead. The Christmas lights amplify this dichotomy: they shine, while reminding us that time keeps moving and that what we haven’t accomplished by year’s end becomes a postponed task, sometimes even a regret. What better companion than cinema to guide us across this threshold separating the already lived from the unknown? A rhetorical question, of course, but one that suggests using cinema not only as escapism, but also as an emotional metronome: it reconnects us to our roots, sets measures, and marks distances.

Today, we focus on two films, distant in time and form, which become perfect tools for navigating this suspended season.

In 2000, Marco Tullio Giordana created one of the most striking portraits of contemporary civil Italy with I Cento Passi. The plot is well known, but it is worth revisiting: Peppino Impastato lives in Cinisi, just a hundred actual steps from the house of the mafia boss Tano Badalamenti. Those hundred steps mark a minimal physical distance, yet an abyssal political and moral divide. Impastato crosses it through Radio Aut, with his sarcastic denunciations, using a language that mocks power and exposes the state-mafia complicity.

Giordana directs a film that is both a historical reconstruction and a social critique. Peppino’s personal story intertwines with the geometries of illegal construction, the speculative developments surrounding the airport, and ecological battles denouncing the destruction of the Sicilian landscape. When every public front is neutralized, Impastato becomes the catalyst of a media revolution: Radio Aut. It is there, in his bare voice, that the film finds its highest rhythm. The city listens, laughs, gets indignant, and above all, fears. Even Badalamenti listens.

The film does not merely reconstruct events: it also exposes institutional falsification, which first tried to define Luigi Impastato’s death as a suicide and then as a failed attack, echoing the cases of Pinelli and Feltrinelli. It is here that Giordana’s direction reaches its most political dimension. 

The use of light, deliberately sparse and almost always indoors, creates a stark contrast with the sun-drenched myth of Sicily. Houses become places of danger, and faces—captured with an almost neo-realist sensitivity—become masks of reticence and calculation. The soundtrack, shifting from folk melodies to pop tracks, stitches together the memory of a divided, uneasy Italy, traversed by opposing extremes.

Critics have spoken of “moral transparency” and “dry sorrow”: definitions that capture the character of the film, a work that brushes against hagiography without succumbing to it, supported by theatrical but never overblown performances. Luigi Lo Cascio builds an Impastato who is fragile, impetuous, and inevitably devoted to civil martyrdom.

If I Cento Passi is a necessary film, a steadfast march toward justice—a page of Italian history that everyone should know and watch to understand the country, its wounds, and its silences—Attitudini: Nessuna belongs to a different dimension: that of a lighthearted, affectionate story, designed for those who want to enter December with a bit of serenity.

Attitudini: Nessuna, by Sophie Chiariello, offers a journey into the popular memory of Aldo, Giovanni, and Giacomo, Italy’s most famous comic trio, told with the light touch of a “docu-panettone” and through the nostalgic lens of director Sophie Chiariello, who previously.

The title, taken from the scathing comment of a teacher on Aldo’s report card, becomes the key to the film: a way of showing how an apparently improbable career found its shape precisely because it was unexpected. In the documentary—produced by Agidi Due in collaboration with Medusa Film, Indigo Film, Driadi, and Prime—we see the trio return to the places of their childhood in popular Milan: from parish halls, streets, and early performances, to the theater schools where their physical and surreal comedy was formed, and finally to the years of the Derby, Zelig, and their television and cinematic success.

The narrative is rich with faces and memories: Marina Massironi, the Gialappa’s Band, Paolo Rossi, Ida Kuniaki, Marina Spreafico, Gino & Michele, Arturo Brachetti. Each contributes to reconstructing an emotional geography, showing how the trio was simultaneously a laboratory, a family, and a workshop. Memory, as Storti observes, is personal and divergent: “everyone remembers in their own way.” Chiariello does not aim for a definitive version of their story, but rather juxtaposes fragments, recollections, and contradictions that reflect the fluid nature of their bond.

And so, as the calendar thins and the holidays approach the line separating before from after, these films—essentially different—suggest a shared moral: time is not measured in years, but in movements.

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Fonte immagine:

Di ignoto - Da via Mancinelli a via Watteau, la storia del Leoncavallo per immagini, su corriere.it., Pubblico dominio, https://it.wikipedia.org/w/ind...