SALVAMI

A girl reveals to a friend that she was beaten and raped by a man. The boy decides to take revenge, so he kidnaps and ties up the rapist, putting him in front of his crimes. In the vast landscape of revenge cinema, we have seen all possible variations on the theme, from western classics like "High Noon" to the magnificent 70s variations like "Death Wish," to paranormal interpretations like "The Crow" and the postmodern exploitation of "Kill Bill" and Park Chan-wook. A theme exploited to the bone, therefore, that if treated with the right approach still manages to surprise, as Niles Arden Oplev recently demonstrated with "Dead Man Down." Into this complex and rich pamphlet of violence and redemption also fits the short film by Gianluca Fedele "Save Me," which however rightly decides to frame the theme from a completely different, more intimate perspective. Although it does not invent anything that has not already been seen elsewhere, Fedele writes and directs a film that refers to the kammerspiel, a "chamber" drama that focuses entirely on the verbal and psychological confrontation between torturer and... torturer. Leaving the victim to a few poses in the prologue, the story centers entirely on the rapist and the avenger, continuously and ambiguously playing on how the two figures are in reality the two sides of the same coin. The rapist points out more than once to his torturer that in reality he is not too different from him, and this is also shown in the image where the rapist himself briefly takes on the features of the avenger, putting the latter face to face with his real or imagined crimes. We do not know much about the avenger boy, while we are shown quite a bit of the rapist, a middle-aged man who claims his goodness in having a wife (incite) and a teenage daughter to whom he dedicates time and loves. The man's schizophrenia thus emphasizes the heavily exploited theme that "evil" hides where we would least expect it, amplifying that discourse on the rotten and façade bourgeoisie that much literature and cinema have proposed over the years. Perhaps "Save Me" lacks that "something" that could distinguish it, because if the basic theme offers good prospects, the development does not go much further, insists on the ambiguity of the avenger's condition and the parallelism with the one who is desired to be punished, abandoning itself to a somewhat too slow pace. Excellent the photography cared for by Alessio Occhiodoro, who functionally alternates glacial tones with warmer ones, thus also bringing forward the basic dualistic narrative theme at the technical/chromatic level. Good the performance of Andrea Gaetani who plays the rapist, less convincing in contrast Davide Rustioni, who appears to us as a disoriented avenger and not in his role. Rounded-up score.