Synopsis
Brianza, 2009. The economic crisis is biting, and Giorgio Farina, heir to a prestigious family gun shop, risks losing everything after investing a fortune in the opening of a luxury boutique in Switzerland. Buried in debt and terrified at the thought of seeing his respectability compromised, Giorgio tries to keep the situation hidden even from his family. His encounter with Alberto Fumagalli, an eccentric businessman who has stolen money from the multinational company he works for, offers him a solution that is as simple as it is criminal: to keep the loot in the gun shop's safe. But between shady deals, weapons, lies and increasingly unreliable characters, what should have been a business deal turns into a spiral of madness and violence. In a world where money is everything and failure is not an option, no one seems willing to accept the consequences of their actions.
Review
10 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 14. October 2026
Money without honor is a disease. — Honoré de Balzac
Welcome to Brianza, geographically very close to Switzerland, where money never sleeps, respectability never fails, and when it does, someone risks never waking up again. With Brianza, presented in the Progressive Cinema Competition at the Rome Film Fest, Simone Catania turns a true-crime story into a grotesque western, a crime comedy in which the Lombard province takes on the contours of a lawless frontier. There are no horses, stagecoaches or gold prospectors, but Porsche Cayennes and Maseratis, catalogue-worthy villas, gun shops, Swiss boutiques and entrepreneurs convinced that the world is one enormous bank counter kept open to meet their needs.
A territory known for its wealth, where work and economic success have become more than goals: certificates of existence, badges of merit, guarantees of respectability. Here, the threat does not come from a gang of outlaws on horseback. It is already inside the house, often wearing a tracksuit, with a luxury car in the garage and a few million euros to save.
The director openly acknowledges his influences: the Coen brothers and Italian black comedies of the 1950s, particularly those of Monicelli. The result follows precisely this line, somewhere between crime and farce, violence and ridicule, with characters who take themselves terribly seriously while the world around them seems intent on dismantling them piece by piece. The Brianza western has its own logic: the frontier does not separate civilization from barbarism, but the villa from the street, the bank balance from the reckoning with reality.
At the centre of the story are Giorgio Farina, played by Fausto Russo Alesi, and Alberto Fumagalli, played by Paolo Pierobon, both irreplaceable in these roles. The former is the respectable gun dealer, heir to a family tradition that should guarantee continuity and prestige; the latter is an entrepreneur sui generis, always wearing a tracksuit, driving a Porsche Cayenne and animated by a worldview in which money is not a means, but proof of the existence of God. Or at least of his own.
Giorgio risks losing everything, not so much his money as his face. Economic failure would already be a problem, but social failure is unbearable: what remains of a respectable man when he can no longer afford to be one? His answer is the most dangerous one: lie, conceal, postpone, pretend that the situation is under control. The disaster is not confronted, but carefully furnished so that no one will notice it.
Fumagalli, on the other hand, seems to have skipped the stage of justifications altogether. He is a concentrated blend of delusions of grandeur, cunning and unpredictability. He does not want to return the money he has stolen, does not want to be cheated, and above all cannot conceive of the possibility that someone else might impose rules on him. It is difficult to determine whether he is completely mad, whether he is playing the part of a madman, or whether he has found a third, particularly advantageous condition in which the two coincide. His strength lies precisely in this ambiguity: behind his apparent recklessness there may be calculation, behind the calculation genuine madness, and behind both a total lack of restraint.
Pierobon gives him a physical presence that oscillates between menace and cabaret. Fumagalli is one of those men who seem capable of doing anything because no one can figure out how far they are willing to go. His tracksuit is almost a professional uniform: clothes do not make the man, but the Porsche certainly makes the entrepreneur, at least until someone comes asking questions about the money.
Among the funniest devices is the Fumagalli shot, the cocktail with which Alberto induces Giorgio to sign a document: egg, vodka, diazepam and opium. A recipe unlikely to find its way onto the cocktail menu of a fashionable bar, but one that perfectly encapsulates the character's philosophy. Giorgio loses his mind and signs: a form of creative contract law, were it not for a few minor issues of legality.
His relationship with weapons is equally revealing. Fumagalli wants a gun, but declares himself a pacifist and specifies that he will keep it in the car's dashboard. A contradiction only in appearance: in this universe, everything is compatible with everything else, provided it does not interfere with one's own interests. One can be an armed pacifist, a decent person willing to commit crimes, a successful man incapable of managing the consequences of his own choices. The important thing is not to compromise the narrative one has constructed about oneself.
And then there are the nativity scenes. Because money, as everyone knows, is not just for making more money: it is also for buying things that demonstrate how much one can afford to spend. In Fumagalli's luxurious villa, among paintings and designer furniture, the basement houses a nativity scene composed of antique figurines, objects for which the owner is willing to shell out considerable sums. Owning an enormous house is not enough: he must also own the Nativity, preferably in a premium edition. And when the collection is incomplete, he sends his brother to procure a Baby Jesus from a church.
The scene takes the grotesque to an almost theological level. The character who considers money an inviolable possession is willing to spend a fortune to represent the birth of Christ, while his brother takes it upon himself to solve the figurine problem through theft. Devotion becomes collecting, tradition an investment, the sacred an object to add to the inventory. There is no need to establish whether this passion is faithful to the real story or a screenwriting invention: on a narrative level, it functions as a miniature of the entire film: one can be obsessed with possession for any kind of perversion.
Whether it is money, cars, designer furniture or eighteenth-century shepherd figurines, the principle remains unchanged: what matters is not the object's value, but the fact that it belongs to him. When capitalism becomes a private delusion, it can even turn the Baby Jesus into a safe-haven asset.
While the men are busy saving their wealth and reputation, the women initially seem destined to occupy a marginal position. Giorgio's wife, played by Marina Rocco, appears to be a naive, somewhat unsophisticated figure, prone to spending and seemingly unaware of the economic catastrophe about to overwhelm the family. Her presence seems to confirm the classic patriarchal division of roles: he takes care of business, she enjoys the results. The problem is that the results no longer exist, but no one has bothered to tell her.
But she has understood far more than the men imagine. His wife already knows Fumagalli, knows he is half mad, and had warned her husband. Her apparent ignorance thus reveals itself as a mask: while the men fret, lie to one another and believe themselves to be in control of the situation, she possesses information they have failed to use. And when the time comes to find a solution, she is the one who knows what to do.
The reversal is delicious because it dismantles one of the most persistent conventions of bourgeois theatre: that of the decorative wife, kept in the dark about business and therefore incapable of understanding reality. Here, the woman is not necessarily more naive than the men; she may simply be less invested in their self-representation. She does not need to play the great entrepreneur, nor prove to anyone that she is invulnerable. While they allow themselves to be consumed by the need to save face, she can still afford to look at the facts. The screenplay thus gives her a decisive role, although the question remains open as to how much this solution belongs to the cinematic reworking and how much to the crime story that inspired the film.
The real story does indeed involve the father-in-law: in the film, the family relationship becomes part of a network in which the family, rather than serving as a barrier against catastrophe, can become a resource for managing it. This is the ultimate reversal of the bourgeois institution: the family is no longer the place where one seeks protection from the consequences of the outside world, but the place where one tries to make the consequences of one's own actions disappear.
In this scenario, Giorgio's son is perhaps the most eloquent character precisely because he hardly speaks at all. Long hair, nail polish, headphones permanently covering his ears: he seems to have chosen the most reasonable strategy available, namely not to listen. The adults talk about money, business, prestige and disasters, while he withdraws from the conversation. His estrangement can be read as a form of rejection, perhaps even as an attempt at self-defence.
In Paolo Virzì's Human Capital, money becomes the unit of measurement for people's worth; in Brianza, its loss threatens to erase the identity of those who possess it. In the former, human life is assessed through an economic logic; in the latter, that same logic ultimately devours those who sustain it.
The contrast between the opulence of the settings and the poverty of the decisions produces a comedy that needs no underlining: it is enough to watch these men surrounded by precious objects as they try to escape the consequences of their actions.
The story is inspired by a real crime that took place in the Como area in 2010, reworked by Catania into a black comedy about the consequences of the economic crisis and the inability to face failure. The director has said that he knew the places and people connected to the story, and that he was struck by the coincidence between the case and a place from his own childhood. The film, however, does not simply reproduce the events: it transforms them into a grotesque reflection on a social environment in which economic success seems to grant advance absolution for any behaviour.
This is where the western acquires its most precise meaning. Catania does not portray Brianza as a land populated exclusively by unscrupulous individuals, but exaggerates a cultural model that does not belong to Brianza alone: one in which work becomes an absolute duty, wealth a measure of personal worth, and the loss of one's fortune an intolerable disgrace.
From this perspective, Fumagalli's delusion and Giorgio's desperation are two sides of the same coin. The former acts as though every rule were made to be circumvented; the latter wants to continue being considered a decent man even as he allows himself to be dragged further and further away from legality. One turns his own madness into a method, the other his respectability into a lie. Both are prisoners of a system in which admitting defeat means definitively losing oneself.
The comedy of Brianza stems from the disproportion between the seriousness with which the characters defend their world and the absurdity of the means they use to save it. Every element adds a piece to a universe in which normality is merely the facade of a profoundly sick system.
The Brianza Far West needs no geographical frontier. Its frontier is moral, and the protagonists cross it with the same nonchalance with which they change cars or purchase an antique figurine. Money promises to protect against everything, but it cannot protect against the need to keep possessing it. And so, as possessions, debts, lies and bodies to be hidden accumulate, one certainty remains: in this world, one can lose everything just to avoid admitting defeat.
Money only appeals to selfishness and inevitably, irresistibly, leads those who possess it to abuse it.
— Albert Einstein
This movie was in the official competition of Rome Film Fest
