In movies, the paucity of violence enhances the impact once the first shots are fired. We feel the threat in the air of Black Souls. The camerawork and storytelling prepare us for bloodshed, and when it arrives we feel the shock and devastation of the victims and their families.
One family in particular bears the brunt in this taut Italian crime thriller. Luciano, Luigi and Rocco are the sons of a shepherd who was murdered by the local crime boss in their small mountain village. Each has responded differently in the ensuing years. Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane), the eldest, stuck around to raise his hothead son Leo (Giuseppe Fumo) and continue herding sheep. Rocco (Peppino Mazzotta) and Luigi (Marco Leonardi) have become big-city criminals in Milan.
None of them can escape the pull of the past: Luciano lives a hollowed-out life expressed in the pain of Ferracane's haunted eyes; the white-collar Luigi and the roughneck Rocco harbor thoughts of revenge and moving up in the world. Rocco spreads the blood thirst to his nephew Leo, bored with a life of tending sheep. Black Souls is above all the story of a family divided, a fraternal knot that can be untied only through tragedy.
Director and co-writer Francesco Munzi lays out the relationships and the stakes without ever forcing his hand.
The story of Black Souls unfolds patiently; it uses small actions and exchanges to tell us what's going on and why we should care. There's a tribal quality to the dusty roads, clandestine meetings and fractured family gatherings, the sense of a timeless world that contrasts with Luigi and Rocco's modern worlds and big ambitions from which they commute on mountain roads and in their souls.
Black Souls is an Old World mob movie, set in the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, rather than the Mafia. It has more grit under its fingernails than the Americanized stories of Italian crime we're used to seeing on these shores. It feels authentic and lived-in. The wounds it explores run deep and wide, even as its drama remains intimate and compact.
BLACK SOULS (A-)
Directed by Francesco Munzi. Not rated (violence, language, nudity). 103 mins. In Italian with English subtitles. At the Dallas and Plano Angelikas.
