CLAUDIO SANTAMARIA IN THE MEDICINE SELLER

A tense corporate thriller about one man enmeshed in the corruption of Italy's Big Pharma.

The Medicine Seller shows Italian filmmaker Antoinio Morabito to be a talent to watch. He has made a nail-bitingly tense film full of the nervous energy and anxiety of its titular protagonist, who started out as a veterinary surgeon and somehow got tempted into the world of drug sales by the lure of competition and fast money which, as the film begins, is beginning to be a dangerous trap.

Bruno (Claudio Santamaria) is a hotshot drug salesman for a big company called "Zafer Pharma" that's tightening the screws on its staff. He sells drugs and bribes doctors into foisting them on their patients. He also uises drugs, and he purveys drugs. He lives a fast life but there is less and less time for enjoyment. Every minute on screen is uneasy and tense. Even a gym workout seems to have to be snatched furtively in a secret corner.

The Medicine Seller is an excellent, exciting feature on the contemporary theme of how pharmacology companies manipulate doctors and patients for high financial gain. It was also a bold one to produce and distribute in mob-mentality Italy: most of the hospitals where the filmmakers were to shoot withdrew permission at the last minute.

TV news coverage in multiple languages bookending the film shows the situation of drug's hard sell today is a topic widely discussed across countries. However, the film's excited reception shows drugs' hard sell isn't yet as open a topic in Italy as the US, though just as prevalent. The public was shocked at Morabito's plain depiction in the film of corrupt doctors. The low level ones who guarantee drug company agents ("medicine sellars") a certain distribution level per month of various drugs in return for promised bribes and payoffs are referred to as "queens" by the drug company's "Regional Head" ("Capo Area"), Giorgia (Isabella Ferrari). She considers the "queens" to be easy marks, and woe betide the salesmen who can't keep their "queens" in line maintaining their quotas. The medical big shots who can deliver real bonanzas to the company she refers to as "sharks." Gio accuses Bruno of not making his quota, and forces him to pressure a "shark," celebrated bigshot oncologist Malinverni (Marco Travaglio) who is a huge, but dangerous and difficult catch. Finding Malinverni's pressure point pushes Bruno to his moral and physical limits and the film to its climax. Claudio Santamaria played Paolo in The Last Kiss, the overburdened friend with the sick father and the girlfriend who has dumped him, unwilling to take on the family church supply business. He takes on Bruno's many-faceted burdens with an unfolding subtlety that impresses, and sustains the film from start to finish.

Morabito is dealing in his feature with hot and current issues that haven't had as strong a feature treatment in the US, but there have been American films. Documentaries include Sasha Knezev's recent but barely seen American Addict. Knezev shows how drugs are flooding American homes and how not only does Big Pharma use doctors as product vendors, but in effect is taking advantage of how the "War on Drugs" has caused illegal drugs to be replaced by the prescription kind. There is also an educational film called Big Bucks, Big Pharma: Marketing Illness and Selling Drugs (2006). The theme of ruthless competition among salesmen from rival drug companies provides background for Edward Zwick's entertaining but superficial 2010 rom-com Love and Other Drugs. Zwick's cliched rom-com hero played by Jake Gyllenhaal is a hotshot pharmaceutical huckster like Bruno in The Medicine Seller. But Morabito's film is closer to Zwick's source, Jamie Reidy's Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, which isn't a rom-com. For the corporate ruthlessness, compare Jason Rietman's Up in the Air. A movie about drug availability (another theme in Morabito's film) is Dallas Buyers Club.

Those two other features have a personal side to sweeten the pill of their exposes of corrupt practices. And The Medicine Seller also depicts Bruno's romantic relations with his partner, Anna (Evita Ciri). The one bright spot in Bruno's life is his sexual romps with Anna, till she gives up taking The Pill -- a decision he secretly can't accept, not feeling ready financially or otherwise to deal with a family. The Medicine Seller is more serious than Love and Other Drugs, more intense than Up in the Air, and as pressing in its message as any documentary indictment of Big Pharma. Of all these films, Morabito's goes into the most detail about bribes, extortion, theft, and the human destruction in the wake of them that results. Morabito achieves intense forward momentum as Bruno gets more and more into a moral, physical, and occupational bind.

Cowritten by Morabito with Michele Pellegrini and Amedeo Pagani, with cold, effective visuals (and often discomfiting camera angles) by Duccio Cimatti.

The Medicine Seller/Il venditore di medicine, 105 mins, debuted at the Rome Film Festival out of competition 10 November 2013. Jay Weissberg wrote an admiring review for Variety at Rome. Italian theatrical release 30 April 2014; good reviews. Screened for the present review as part of the San Francisco Film Society's New Italian Cinema series (Nov. 19-23, 2014), where it is showing at the Vogue Theater November 22, 2014, 6:30 p.m.

At the end of the San Francisco series this film was given the City of Florence Award for best film of the festival, which was well deserved.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.