TONI SERVILLO AND ELIO GERMANO IN SICILIAN LETTERS

OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA - ANTONIO PIAZZA, FABIO GRASSADONIA: SICILIAN LETTERS/IDDU-L'ULTIMO PADRINO (2024)

A crime movie whose action is largely epistolary isn't really an action movie

In the new film by Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia ( Sicilian Ghost Story, Open Roads 2018; Salvo, New Directors/New Films 2014), Matteo (Elio Germano), a fugitive mob boss in hiding, begins a curious mediated correspondence with a former acquaintance of his father’s, his godfather Catello (Toni Servillo), a corrupt politician who has just been released after a six-year prison sentence. Catello has come out only to be faced by a great burden of debts and suits. The authorities force him into this correspondence in exhcnage for lightening them. Said authorities hope to draw out Matteo from his lair by doing this.

Their letters find the two men quickly re-forming their friendship, but this bond is complicated by Catello's cooperation with police. In a not-very-enthusiastic Variety review in which she refers to this film as "a heavily fictionalized riff on a real-life mafia tale" Jessica Kiang points out, in polite understatement, that letter-exchanging (a lost art nowadays anyway) is "not the most cinematic of activities." This indeed proves to be the case in the complicated, confounding Sicilian Letters, the third crime film from the Italian team of Piazza and Grassadonia. There are a couple of point-blank shootings out of the blue, but most of this film is surprisingly turgid, and I spent most of the time not knowing quite whaat was going on. The Italian members of the Open Roads audience would laugh occasionally, showing that thee was some humor that eluded those for whom Italian was not the first language. At the outset I did grasp that the whole situation was distinctly dry and ironic, but how those ironies played out eluded me. This is a puzzler, and not quite suitable for non-Italian audiences, despite reported multiple home critics' awards.

One kept being hopeful, because the film features in the lead two of the greatest actors in recent Italian cinema, Elio Germano and Toni Servillo. With their performances, Germano and Servillo should give a headstart to the filmmaking duo's third cinematic effort to riff freshly on the Italian crime film. But their work remains enmired in the complicated, slow-moving action. Spoiler alert: Matteo is so deeply in hiding, he is concealed behind a slide-away door in the secret compartment of a house. Because this concealment was purely physical business, it was one part of this convoluted film that I could appreciate, if only briefly. But at two hours and two minutes, this whole effort was pretty slow going.

Sicilian Letters/Iddu-l'ultimo padrino (Iddu-the Last Godfather), 22 mins., premiered at Venice Sept. 5, 2024, showing also at Zurich, Chicago, São Paulo, Haifa, and some Italian film series, including the May 29-Jun. 5, 2025 Open Roads Italian series at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. Showtimes were:

Friday, May 30 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia
Wednesday, June 4 at 6:00pm

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