Lettres siciliennes

The best Mafia stories are based on real life events set in Sicily. Case in point - Bellocchio's Il traditore/the Traitor (2019) -Pierfrancesco Favino's portrait of Tommaso Buscetta that still contains the most entertaining court scenes in world cinema.

In this new film by Piazza and Grassadonia (Sicilian Ghost Story, 2018), Germano portrays a fugitive mob boss who capitulates to a legendary exchange of sub rosa letters (think fish gills) with his godfather (Toni Servillo), a twisted politician recently freed from prison. Bad apples do not reformulate, they only grow more rotten, and so it goes with Servillo's character. The biopic is inspired by real events made more compelling by an absorbing performance from Germano, sided by Servillo's effortless offer.

Sicilian Letters keeps the Italian crime film genre alive with the cat and mouse pace and the beautifully shot aesthetic we expect from this much-loved genre. The film won multiple critics' awards at its Venice Film Festival premiere.

Whenever it comes to cosa nostra and messina denaro, there is a lot to be said and written. So much so that it is hard to fail when it comes to picking a storyline.

In this case, it doesn't really matter, as unfortunately, this was like an exercise for the directors of how to shoot a movie just based on colors and photography,

Making a serious mafia movie isn't just about the location and the costumes; it's mostly about the actors and the way they can be convincing about their roles. This wasnt hard to do if it was based on a good casting, but it wasn't, i felt like it was an amateurish take of what could have been.

I couldn't go past the first 30 min, each step of the story was so scripted that you could tell what was going to happen in the next 10 min, and unfortunately, knowing a bit of the actual real-life story ruined it all for me,

As 9 out of 10 actors were overacting, putting so much effort into things that don't matter, rather than the dialogue that actually made the film come to life.

Waste of time, especially if you like real-life movies, is unfortunate, because this topic is one of the coolest topics in the modern cosa nostra.

I don't know, I found it very boring and acted in a way that was too caricatural: the result is a boring and difficult narration that takes too many things for granted to be fluid and engaging. Toni Servillo and Elio Germano are caricatures bordering on the annoying and stereotypical, or rather, unfortunately, beyond, and they certainly do not play a good role in the flow of the story. Which is almost a non-story, boring and squalid, just like the life of the two protagonists, built through the notes that Messina Denaro exchanged with all those who knew of his being a fugitive in broad daylight, but still clandestine. One could say that this "Iddu" is a missed opportunity, because it wallows in stereotypes and caricatures that are now stale and overused, something that, on the other hand, Colapesce's soundtrack does not do, resulting in fact in the best thing in this low profile mafia movie.