‘The City Of the Living’ Venice Review: A True-Crime Case Becomes A Tender, Unjudging Character Study

A normal life. That’s what Luca (Emanuele Maria Di Stefano) appears to have. He has his problems and complications, his gray areas, but nothing beyond what any 23-year-old living in a working-class suburb outside Rome might have to deal with. The adopted son of Silvana and Giuseppe Varani (played by Simona Senzacqua and Valerio Mastandrea), with whom he still lives, Luca is only half-heartedly trying to finish high school. He has a girlfriend, Marta (Gaia Merlonghi), whom he brings home to meet his parents, and who gets along well with them. He helps his father run the candy and gift cart that Giuseppe operates. But something, it seems, doesn’t quite add up.

The City of the Living sets out to tell his life methodically. Little by little we start to see that Luca has some darker sides. At times he turns unnecessarily aggressive and cruel with Marta, only to regret it afterward and ask her forgiveness. And he has a habit of disappearing at night, almost dropping off the map, as if in search of adventures in nearby Rome. Gabbriellini narrates his life in a realistic, unhurried way, without shocks, like a slightly distanced chronicle of a kid in his twenties looking for something like his place in the world. Gradually we see that these nocturnal outings are somewhat more daring, denser than the ordinary. But they’re never lived or shown as drama: they’re simply part of the protagonist’s choices.

The film is based on a real case drawn from a non-fiction book by Nicola Lagioia. To properly get into what it’s about requires saying a bit more, so consider this a Spoiler Warning. What the director gradually reveals is a parallel line of work the boy keeps secret: he’s a sex worker. There’s no moralizing in the film’s tone, no particularly heavy dramatic weight placed on showing this side of his life. With certain Pasolinian echoes, the director of B. B. & Il Cormorano —also an experienced actor and a longtime collaborator of Luca Guadagnino— tries to present a character who has what others would call a double life. But that’s not how he experiences it. Or not entirely. It’s an integral part of his attempt to be in the world, to connect with it. End of Spoilers.

What The City of the Living does is take a case that made headlines and tell it in a dry, perhaps somewhat detached register, far from any kind of sensationalism and even further from gratuitous cruelty. We can imagine his life growing more complicated, but the film never drags the viewer through the experience via suspense or anguish. What it does is present a young man in his twenties, respecting his choices no matter how problematic they might seem to some, and never judging him. His search for meaning will lead him to bad decisions but, above all, will put him in contact with the world’s risks. And the director is generous enough to let him simply be.

This is a film with a humanist gaze that never tries to ennoble or romanticize anything. Nor does it swing the other way: except for the odd moment, nothing is shown in a graphic or menacing light. It also doesn’t look for explanations or over-psychologize its character, preferring to preserve the mystery of what drives him to do what he does. Gabbriellini narrates from a prudent distance and with an enviable economy of means. The rest is left to the actors, to Rome, to the days and nights, to the wrong decisions and the consciously taken risks — even when the results are painful, even cruel. Life sometimes plays tricks on those who throw themselves into living it.