I don't know if director Lucio Marcaccini was aiming for a more realistic approach to the Eurocrime genre, because this film is devoid of the usual traits of gun battles, car chases, and people glaring over the top of their giant moustaches. Instead, we get a lot of stuff about the Italian student body, political unrest, the class system, and a lot of boredom. This might well be the worst Eurocrime film I've watched, and that number must surely by now be in the nineties. The number, not the decade.
Marco is a young, annoying, left-wing hippy type looking to destroy the system if has time between all the sex, drugs, and stealing antique snuff boxes from stuffy middle class types. This antique snuff box provides some sort of hook in a film that has too many characters and not too much going on. Marco has several mates, including the daughter of the guy he stole the box from, and a rich kid who has an Oedipus complex who wants loads of drugs. There's also the hard case cop (Marcel Bozzuffi) who is after the antique box, but also wants to track down Marco in order to get to a high-level drug dealer.
In amongst the teenagers getting wasted on drugs, the parents lamenting about their kids being wasted on drugs, the mid-seventies philosophy...nothing much happens. The highlight of the film, and the only bit that really caught my attention was a mass hallucination bit once the kids get their drugs, resulting in a colourful trippy sequence that the rest of the film could have benefitted from.
Boring! I don't mind Damiano Damiani's long, meandering crime flicks. The drama keeps things rolling along. This one is just disjointed.
