Pierfrancesco Favino Also Continues To Rock

Winner, Best Actor For Michele Alhaique’s ‘Senza Nessuna Pietà

The Bari International Film Fest named Pierfrancesco Favino best actor in the first and second works competition for his part in Michele Alhaique’s ‘Senza Nessuna Pietà’.

Senza Nessuna Pietà premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival and we’ve been waiting for it to show up here in the United States ever since.

Favino gained fifty pounds and shows every bit of his star potential as Mimmo, part of a crime family but is happier at his day job as a construction worker. Having been left fatherless at an early age, his uncle raised him and expects his bruiser nephew to provide muscle when debts need to be collected. Mimmo is perfectly capable but clearly unhappy about his lot in life, destined, it seems, to live it out in a clinically depressed state.

When his spoiled and obnoxious cousin Manuel (Adriano Giannini) wants him to pick up and babysit a young prostitute, played by the very beautiful Greta Scarano, a protective side emerges from Mimmo. “Tanya” has been hired for a party but when delivered to Manuel, Mimmo sees that she’s in trouble and comes to her rescue, knowing full well that in doing so he’s signed his own death warrant.

There’s a kind of “beauty and the beast” quality to Mimmo and Tanya’s love story, as Tanya begins to care for him and then literally cares for him when he is punished for going against the family. They are a bit of an odd couple, but the chemistry is there and when they meet, you can see the relief in their eyes. In their “hard-knock lives, they’d never considered that they might find someone who actually want the best for them.