SanPa: Sins of the Savior

I enjoyed it but it was terribly slow. We all could see where it's going but it took damn long to get there. Too many side interviews with too many people.

In the 80s in Italy there was a very well known rehab, San Patrignano, which apparently made miracles in the rehabilitation of former junkies. Its founder, Vincenzo Muccioli, was a charismatic man with the allure of a secular televangelist. He rode the wave of the heroin moral panic that had Italy in thrall at the time with great media and political awareness. Soon he was exceedingly famous and unbelievably powerful. All was well -- till allegations of violence and torture started to surface.

In a nutshell, this is the story of Sanpa. The first part establishes the scene, and then it becomes pretty much a procedural thriller. If you are not Italian, if you don't have a special interest in contemporary Italiana, or if you weren't yet alive at the time, your appreciation of this documentary will depend on your ability to survive the first hour. If you do, your patience will be rewarded: it becomes more and more gripping as the story evolves. The denouement will keep you on the edge of your seat.

For the moral implications of the character and the story, the documentary casts no judgement, and neither will I, at least not for the main subject, the accusations of violence, whose resolution I won't reveal.

However, I can't suspend judgement for the extraordinary misogynistic scenes where Muccioli states, in various separate occasions, with the help of a smug, self-satisfied metaphor, that a woman cannot be raped if she doesn't want to. I understand that MeToo was still a long time away, that it was a conservative country with pockets of astonishing ignorance and machoism -- but for me it was too much, and I lost any empathy for the main character; from that moment on, regardless of the final outcome, for me he was the villain. The abundance of supporters that show on screen to defend him blindly and paint him as a martyr becomes very strident, to the point that one wishes for more time to go by and wash away the last relics of a very unsavoury Italian past.

In any case, the documentary is totally worth watching, quite illuminating in fact. At the very least, it will make you appreciate how the 80s were different from the present -- really, like the poet says, a foreign country.

Now I personally was not aware of the story of not just the rehab center that is in the middle of this docu series but also the man responsible for it. The 80s may seem like a strange time or even a different planet at times, especially if one has not lived through certain things, but that is true for anything foreign to us or our way of life. And by "us" I mean the viewer in general and what he or she has gone through in life and how it affects the experience of watching this.

The docu series does try to stay as neutral as possible. Letting people speak that defend the man and his project, but also giving us the views of people who are or were not so enamoured by him and whatever he achieved. Or I guess by his methods would be more true. Good intentions paving the road and all that ... and of course the downfalls of becoming famous - or infamous. Personal likings and the gravity of machism culture mixed with drugs and other "highs".

The show may begin slow but takes up speed. Still 5 episodes of this may not be what most/some want to endure. That will be up to you to decide. Definitely worth watching if you like these types of shows