Five young individuals who are considered antiheroes try to take vengeance two decades after an incident that happened during their childhood. However, these things from the past always catch up with us and there comes a time when we have to confront them Eravamo bambini by Marco Martani, which was presented in the Alice Nella Città section of the 18th Rome Film Fest back in October and will be distributed in Italian cinemas on 21 March by Europictures, is a revenge thriller steeped in coming of age elements. Based on Zero – a theatrical text by Massimiliano Bruno, who also co-wrote the screenplay with the director himself – Martani’s third feature film (following Concrete Romance and She’s The One) is above all a human drama spanning three different eras and five tales of shattered existences: those of a group of friends who suffered an unspeakable trauma but haven’t seen each other since that fateful summer’s day twenty years before.
Everything starts off in a small town on the Calabrian coast, where Cacasotto (Francesco Russo) so called because he is generally regarded as being rather dim is stopped by night-time police officers near a powerful local politician’s villa with a long knife in his hand. Taken to the police station for questioning, he begins to speak. It is at this point that we are introduced individually and immediately to the other characters, who all lead dysfunctional lives: Gianluca (Alessio Lapice), a riotous policeman when he has his truncheon; Margherita (Lucrezia Guidone), who works as a journalist but dabbles occasionally in some very low-grade sex, Walter (Lorenzo Richelmy), an accomplished trapper whose coarseness knows no bounds even where his little girl is concerned, and Andrea (Romano Reggiani), Margherita’s little brother, who is a hard drug user and gets regularly beaten up by loan sharks.
We are shown several heartbreaking tranches de vie, interspersed with much warmer and more radiant images that turn out to belong to more distant times when these same characters were nothing but children spending their holidays by the Calabrian sea with their parents. When a message pops up on one of these thirty-somethings’ mobiles years later, summoning them all to an expected yet unexpected confrontation (“the time has come, ready or not”), the jigsaw pieces start to fit together. A sixth member of that old group of friends emerges: Peppino (Giancarlo Commare), son of the despicable Rizzo (massimo Popolizio), himself traumatised by this “maladroit” father figure.
Martani, the co-founder of Wildside production company, is also known for being a scriptwriter. He has written more than 50 movies such as The Mafia Only Kills in Summer, winner of the 2014 EFA Prize. With that said, Martani effortlessly handles different parts of this captivating story to keep them confusing but still easy to follow at the same time until he brings out all their hidden meanings one by one towards the end while ensuring that they remain thrilling enough by introducing some unexpected twists along the way. This work features many young gifted performers who have excellent chemistry among themselves thereby enabling them express every single aspect about their roles (these are not heroes seeking for vengeance; rather these are people whose lives were shattered twenty years ago on that fateful day). Therefore, such an approach makes it an intense and sometimes even brutal reflection upon innocence lost.
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