Title: The Catholic School (La Scuola Cattolica)
Director: Stefano Mordini
Language: Italian
Running time: 106'
The Circeo massacre of 1975 shook the Italian society forever. The Italy of 1970s was already a time of political and social change, a lot of things were quickly reforming in that fragile society. The Circeo massacre succeeded in changing the rape law in Italy, but at what cost? Mordini’s The Catholic School (La Scuola Cattolica) tries to retell the story of the crime, but with a twist that seems quite unexpected and in a certain sense unjustified. The movie puts down an analysis of the upper class society in which the offenders Gianni Guido (interpreted by Francesco Cavallo), Angelo Izzo (Luca Vergoni) and Andrea Ghira (Giulio Pranno) lived, but rather than condemn their community, it seems like the director wants to justify their criminal actions.
The story is told by Edoardo Albinati’s (Emanuele Maria Di Stefano) VoiceOver, in order to keep the link with the homonymous 2016 novel written by Albinati himself, from which the movie takes inspiration. The narration takes us for the good first half of the movie inside the families of a lot of the kids who attended the same all boys catholic school of the offenders, but with a focus on way too many characters that had nothing to do with the massacre. We are shown the way these boys thought the world was theirs just because their moms and dads could take them out of trouble with money if needed. We are taken into their masculinity oriented society, surrounded by the fake catholicism that characterises most of the families: patriarchy at its finest. We understand that these wealthy families sent their kids to this catholic school because they wanted them to be sheltered from the atrocities of the world, without realising that their children were the ones committing them.
In the second half of the movie, we almost completely leave out most of the characters, and finally focus on the three offenders and the two victims. These last two, Donatella Colasanti (Benedetta Porcaroli) and Rosaria Lopez (Federica Torchetti) are hardly characterised at all, and while they should be the focus of the movie, they are kind of left there, without any importance at all, as if the film wasn’t about them. Also, the movie is told in chapters, jumping back and forth in the months and hours up to the days that lead to the massacre, so while we are trying to make sense of all these boys and characters, we are also expected to do some math.
What the movie tries to do is explain the society in which these boys lived, but what it really does is create a justification for them, almost an excuse. It’s like it’s trying to tell us that their wealthy life didn’t teach them what was right and wrong, that they had a “difficult” childhood and family backgrounds, and so we should at least understand where they were coming from. The reality is that, one of the boys who did not commit the massacre even had a difficult loss in his family, but he still didn’t rape two girls and kill one of them, so really, what is the movie trying to tell us? Its intentions aren’t clear even at the end, when, on a black screen, we are told that the Circeo massacre reshaped Italian rape law, followed by the stories of the three oppressors: after all three were sentenced to life in prison, Andrea Ghira was never apprehended and never spent a day in jail for his crimes; Gianni Guido’s sentence was reduced to thirty years, but he was able to flee the prison beforehand and, after being apprehended again, was pardoned in 2009; and finally, Angelo Izzo’s sentence was reduced and, after he was let out on parole, he killed two more women in 2005.
The director seems to avoid taking a stance on the situation of these boys, when, in a movie like this, not taking the side of the victims means taking the side of the oppressors. We are all left to wonder, what would Donatella and Rosaria think if they saw this movie today?
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