Velcocita Massima (2002) Working Class Italian Style"
This film is directed by Daniele Vicari starring Valerio Mastandrea (as Stefano), Cristiano Morroni (as Claudio), Alessia Barela (as Giovanna), Ivano De Matteo (as Fischio) and many others. It is a story about a teenage boy (2 months to become 18) by the name of Claudia who takes a job as an Ostia mechanic's apprentice at Stefano's garage. Stefano is a guy who looks much like a chameleon putting on a business suit to meet with his bank manager to discuss a bad check and then putting his overalls back on when he is up to his eyes in debt. His betrayal of his best friend Claudio (trust, money and worst of all having sex with Claudio's girl Giovanna) is the worst thing he should not do but he does not even realize it. People must give a meaning to any and everything, from friendship to work to women, says Stefano. Claudia is a working class hero who wants to be a mechanic making sure that the money Stefano spent on modifying his Ford Sierra Cosworth is worthwhile to beat Fischio's Toyota Supra. Undoubtedly, the director Vicari has portrayed Claudio, played by 23-year-old Cristiano Morroni, to be the most complex character of this film. This is a great challenge for 23-year-old Cristiano Morroni who, to paraphrase a line from Italo Calvino Il Midollo del leone looks like a lion, but is a real softy inside.
Centering around illegal motor racing on Italian roads, this film comes from the Director Vicari's observation of a motor world which attracted hundreds of motors fans particularly that 5-6,000 people die in car accidents on the Italian roads every year. In renowned motor magazines and also in publications like Wheels¡¨ we read about cars which can reach up to 300km/h and they are not even souped up, car rallies are on the increase and the police take part in the challenge everywhere in the world. Daniele Vicari, a young Italian director (born in 1967) who is very honored to direct this film. Velocita Massima which in competition at Venice, has a sociological vocation demonstrating that those who have the most powerful car and the best looking woman are the most admirable. This aspect of human nature is more subdued in those who were born and brought up in a Catholic environment in Italy. It is a big business but it is also a classic male fantasy of exotic cars which heats up with the relationship between Stefano and apprentice mechanic Claudio with a woman Giovanna as the bait. Vicari explains our society is virtually full of impossible possibilities. There is a lot of money circulating in the suburbs, cars worth lire 40 million, powerful, roaring bikes, but there is not any cultural and no critical judgment. Only sensitive people like Claudio realize how culturally sterile the world they inhabit is. And like him, they suffer hugely as they acquire and develop a social conscience. So in the end, Claudio dismantles the Sierra Cosworth as a form of protest, and walk away. Velocita Massima tries to deconstruct these extreme forms of behavior through plain speaking. In Italian films, the working class was often portrayed by directors of a different background and that resulted in their being judgmental.
