Guest
Tommaso begins with with a near-duplication of the expositional footage found in Brindisi ‘65, the same collection of dilapidated housing, suspended washing lines, and women and children spilling out onto the street. But this time the images provide the context to a more focused portrait. We meet Tommaso Lorussi as he comes crashing through freshly hung laundry on a Vespa – a bike which, in a later scene, we discover belongs to a man who confronts Tommaso about his habit of stealing. Described in voice-over as apolitical and still having no criminal record, Tommaso narrates an imagined future of girls and money – all contingent, as he sees it, on getting his dream job, at the Monteshell petrochemical plant. This buoyant narrative is intercut with portraits of boys a few years his senior, forced to hustle on the streets while they wait to be hired by the factory, as well as the mother of a son whose death at the plant was caused by inadequate safety measures. Perhaps the most didactic of the films in this programme, Tommaso’s delusions serve as an object lesson on the false promises of Western capitalism. As the voice-over tells us at the end of the film, Tommaso’s future is not, in fact, in his hands, but in those of a global ‘monopoly’ that depends on his subordination”
