Serpenti

 

“The political situation in Italy is serious, but it is not serious-minded.” 

The aphorism, which opens the film and is attributed to Ennio Flaiano, could be the perfect epigraph for Serpenti. 

Because Roberto De Paolis Maino's film takes an extremely serious crime — a man killing his wife — and plunges it into a social machine so distorted that it turns tragedy into farce. Not in order to diminish the horror, but to reveal something perhaps even more disturbing: the possibility that a society may have lost even the institutional capacity to recognize evil when it stands directly before its eyes. 

Paolo Marra has killed. He does not seek to escape, does not fabricate an alibi, does not claim innocence. He does exactly what, according to the most elementary logic of responsibility, a guilty person should do: he turns himself in. And yet no one seems to know what to do with him. 

This is where the paradoxical masterpiece of Serpenti begins: the guilty man is finally available, but society is not available to receive him as guilty. 

Instead of moving towards the truth, the judicial system begins circling around itself. The interrogation becomes a brilliant comic machine of inconclusiveness: everything is discussed except the essential question. The man has confessed to murder, yet his confession almost seems to be the least interesting element of the story. First there are forms to fill out, facts to verify, circumstances to interpret, categories to establish, events to reconstruct. First they must determine which box the murderer belongs in. And while bureaucracy searches for the correct form of the crime, the crime itself risks disappearing. 

It is a profoundly Kafkaesque logic: it is no longer the individual who finds himself before the Law; it is the Law that transforms itself into a labyrinth in which the individual can no longer find his place. 

The direction takes an even more corrosive approach. The lawyer does not simply arrive to defend his client: he arrives to rewrite the script of what happened, as often happens in reality. 

The real guilty man must become a narratively convenient guilty man. Responsibility must be translated into a script made up of mitigating circumstances, trauma, incapacity, circumstances, motives and grey areas. Guilt is no longer necessarily denied: it is administered, reassembled, made presentable. It is rewritten. 

The conversation between lawyer and client, conducted in a bar because even the police station has no suitable room available, is therefore one of the cruelest miniatures of the entire system. Justice does not even need a courtroom to distort the truth. A table is enough. 

And this is where the comedy becomes political. 

Because Serpenti does not simply argue that the Italian justice system does not work. Its intuition is more radical: it works according to a logic different from the one we imagine. Not necessarily according to the logic of truth, responsibility and punishment, but according to the logic of procedure, representation, convenience, and the need to construct a narrative compatible with the functioning of the apparatus. 

Paolo thus becomes a paradoxical creature: simultaneously perpetrator and victim, guilty and rejected, responsible and socially invisible. It is precisely this ambiguity that De Paolis Maino identifies in his director's notes, describing him as a character who is at once “gigantic and tiny,” “perpetrator and victim.” 

And this is where femicide takes on a dimension that goes beyond the individual case. The body of the murdered woman becomes the blind spot around which an entire system of repression and denial revolves. 

Significantly, the film does not dwell on the spectacularization of violence. It shifts its gaze from the act to its social management, from the murder to the indifference surrounding it. It is precisely this act of subtraction that makes the film politically more ruthless: gender-based violence is not used as an object of easy indignation, but as a detonator through which to observe a society that seems no longer capable of assigning things their proper weight. 

And this is where Serpenti becomes a metaphor for Italy. 

A country in which what is enormous can become small and what is small can become enormous. Where the gravity of a fact by no means guarantees its seriousness. Where the system can be inflexible towards the individual while appearing surprisingly permeable when confronted with greater powers, interests and responsibilities. 

The film's provocation is almost scandalous in its simplicity: perhaps, in order to be prosecuted, one must not be important enough for one's guilt to become inconvenient. 

The petty criminal must be identifiable, available, manageable. The great crime, by contrast, can enter the infinitely more sophisticated territory of interpretations, guarantees, diluted responsibilities, jurisdictions, procedures and grey areas. 

Guaranteeism, in its caricatural degeneration, thus becomes a peculiar form of social selection: absolute when it protects power, almost nonexistent when it has to protect those who possess no power. 

Serpenti pushes this principle to the point of absurdity. Tired of not being believed, Paolo reaches the paradoxical realization that the police may need not his confession, but a crime that will make them protagonists. For the system to function, it seems to need to produce the very object of its intervention. 

It is one of the film's darkest intuitions: it is not enough for a crime to exist; there must also be an institutional stage on which the crime can exist. 

And so the man who wants to be arrested discovers that he is not useful enough to the machinery of repression. His confession produces no spectacle, no chase, no emergency. It does not even produce the kind of criminal who allows the apparatus to feel necessary. 

The ending pushes this logic to its extreme consequences: reality itself must almost be manufactured so that justice can finally recognize it. 

This is where the film definitively ceases to be merely a dark comedy about a murderer and becomes an ontological satire of power. 

Power, after all, does not merely judge reality: it produces it. It decides what is relevant, what is credible, what deserves legal proceedings, what can be transformed into a case, a file, an emergency, a spectacle. 

And Paolo discovers the ultimate form of contemporary alienation: not being denied because he is innocent, but being ignored because he is guilty in the wrong way. 

Even the cinematic form participates in this distortion. Gianluca Rocco Palma's cinematography constructs a chromatically restrained, almost emptied-out universe, while the images of bodies and faces acquire an estranging quality. Vittorio Giampietro's music accompanies this world with a jazz-like coldness that neither consoles nor comments; rather, it seems to emerge from within the absurd itself. Everything appears slightly out of alignment: the faces, the institutions, the spaces, the conversations. 

As though reality were still recognizable, but had lost its geometry. 

And this is probably the true strength of the screenplay, written by De Paolis Maino together with Damiano and Fabio D'Innocenzo: constructing a narrative progression in which every situation is simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying, until comedy and anguish become indistinguishable. 

Leonardo Lidi masterfully sustains this paradox. His Paolo is neither a monster nor an innocent man. He is something far more disturbing: a man forced to confront a guilt that no one truly wants to acknowledge. His bewilderment gradually becomes the spectator's own. 

And so the fundamental question is no longer simply what Paolo has done. 

It is what happens to a society when even a man who asks to be punished can no longer find anyone willing to assume the responsibility of judging him. 

In this sense, Serpenti is a film about the removal of guilt — or, more precisely, of responsibility. 

And the title, the film's only element that I find unconvincing, becomes almost a moral figure: the snakes are not merely the individuals moving within the system, but the sinuous forms through which responsibility sheds its skin, shifts elsewhere, hides itself and coils back upon itself. 

In the end, what remains is Flaiano's Italy: gravely ill and grotesque, terrible and farcical, capable of turning murder into an administrative matter and procedures into a comedy of paradox, subservient to power, castes, politics and the economy.