I Love Italian Everything

In Ruggine (means “rust” in Italian) everything is in place for a perfect movie, but I knew in the first ten minutes that director Daniele Gaglianone had screwed it up.

From a novel by Stefano Massaron, it’s the story of a band of children in the 70s, immigrants from the south in the suburbs of a city in northern Italy, and a pedophile medical doctor (played by one of my favorites, Filippo Timi).

Valerio Mastandrea, Stefano Accorsi and Valeria Solarino play three of the children, decades later, as adults that are grappling with what happened to them all those years ago when one of their friends was raped and killed, and another kidnapped.

Here’s what Ruggine should have been: a dark, fairy tale allegory of children bravely battling evil in a forbidden castle (an abandoned dump that they’ve been forbidden from playing in)  with no help from the adults that have sworn to protect them.

Here’s what it ended up to be: a tired and melodramatic movie on the theme of child abuse.

The story was there and the actors too, but it’s slow (S-L-O-W), it’s without direction, and it’s boring. So much time was wasted watching the grown-up victims gnash their teeth and muddle mawkishly through their tortured existences.

The parts with the bands of children out to play and the world they’ve created  are interesting, but their monster is too undefined; not quite boogey man and not quite sex offender. Gaglianone could have put him more in the shadows, more a mysterious menace, or a well-defined and straight-forward criminal, but he’s done neither. Ruggine’s villian is a nasty doctor who’s acting weird and picking off the children. Ruggine offers nothing new, nothing startling, and nothing we here in the US haven’t seen in a Lifetime movie when it comes to pedophilia.

The children are the true stars of the movie, navigating this tragedy with honesty and authenticity, but of them, Gaglianone tells too little. Is Sandro scarred for life because what he’s done or because of the consequences of what he’s done? And anway, what were the consequences? There’s a possibility that Sandro would have headed down a bad path with or without this horrific incident, but we can’t know – the question isn’t even explored.

Whatever Italy thought of Ruggine, it’s unexportable. This is the kind of movie that Americans fall asleep watching in the first half hour.