Crisis – What crisis? The jobless society and Italian cinema in the early 2000s

This article proposes a synthetic analysis and contextualization of the most significant, thought-provoking films made in Italy during the first decade of the twenty-first century which thematize or in other ways convey the circumstances of today’s growing social inequality. Such circumstances entail collective and individual trauma, loss of security and well-being in individuals and families, indeed an increase in family breakdown – in other words, a pervasive social crisis. The films examined are: F Comencini’s Mobbing (Mi piace lavorare, 2003); Tavarelli’s Break Free (Liberi, 2003); Cappuccio’s I Only Wanted to Sleep On Top of Her (Volevo solo dormirle addosso, 2004); Amelio’s The Missing Star (La stella che non c’è, 2006); Soldini’s Days and Clouds (Giorni e nuvole, 2007); P Virzì’s A Whole Life Ahead (Tutta la vita davanti, 2008); and Venier’s The 1000 Euro Generation (Generazione Mille Euro, 2009).

While the extremely diverse richness of these films from the formal and existential viewpoint does not allow for their (un-systemic) commonalities to be captured by any specific formula, they do share one broad general attitude toward their public: they all refuse to manipulate it by exploitative narrative strategies (the term ‘exploitative’ here means that a film both oversimplifies/dumbs down and spectacularizes issues for box-office purposes). By their very complexity, these seven films put in place an honest and intelligent mimesis of the world that surrounds us and thus fulfil what can be argued to be the essential requirement of a solid realism.