"Il Capitale Umano" / Human Capital

A wintry northern Italy is the setting for an anguishing thriller featuring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Valeria Golino, Fabrizio Bentivoglio and Fabrizio Gifune

Based on Stephen Amidon’s novel set in moneyed Connecticut, Human Capital smoothly relocates to Italy’s wealthy north in an engrossing if anxiety-provoking tale about two families whose destinies are tied together by a road accident. Though director Paolo Virzi (who is also the director of the Turin Film Festival) is best known for intelligent comedies like his award-winning The First Beautiful Thing, there is very little to laugh about in this anguishing thriller set in a downward-spiraling economy. A top-flight cast gives the character-driven drama depth and conviction and the Italo-French coprod has gotten off to a strong start locally, despite its underlying  grimness. It will come out in France next month and it should be on festival radar.  

The term “human capital” is legalese that designates an accident victim’s net worth in compensation claims. Here it aptly defines the Bernaschi and Ossola families, the first elegant capitalists and the second struggling middle-classers. Dino Ossola (Fabrizio Bentivoglio, sporting a northern accent and impossibly bad hair) is an embarrassingly gauche social climber who mortgages the house to buy into the Bernaschi family hedge fund, while his wife Roberta (Valeria Golino) is pregnant with twins. Serena (Matilde Gioli), his daughter by a first marriage, attends the same swanky prep school as the Bernaschi’s lunkish son Massimiliano (Guglielmo Pinelli) and the two are dating. Dino's eyes are glued to the illusion of wealth as pure happiness.

 

Told in four “chapters,” each focusing on a different character, the film revisits the fateful rainy night of a school awards ceremony, when the Ossolas are invited to the VIP table of suave fund manager Giovanni (Fabrizio Gifune) and his wife Carla (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). The often-abused device of filming the same scene from different points of view is handled with great sophistication here, adding just enough new info to advance the ongoing tragedy as it settles gloomily around the protags, without giving away the finale.

 

But the film is more than just a chic thriller. Alongside its clear -- at times overly so -- depiction the pain and vanity of social inequality, Virzi and the fine cast explore the unhappiness of rich and poor alike in a society that measures a person’s value in terms of euros. There’s a Gatsbyish echo here, but the feeling is closer to Luca Guadagnino’s 2009 classy upper bourgeois meller I Am Love and its memorable portrayal of Italy’s top class. Here things are a bit more obvious, like the early scenes of class politics on the tennis court, or an alarming parade of black limos that heralds a decisive stockholder meeting.

 

Though not quite the vehicle for Bruni Tedeschi in the same way that I Am Love was for Tilda Swinton, it still gives B.T., who is very much at ease as a privileged lady of the manor, one of her best roles in a long time. Playing a fantastically limp trophy wife who once aspired to be an actress, her Carla is a beauty on the cusp, whose idealistic project to reclaim a boarded-up theater leads her to an absurd bid for sexual freedom with the wrong man. Echoes of Virzi’s signature black comedy can be felt in the biting cruelty of the seduction scene, played against the background of Carmelo Bene’s cult film Our Lady of the Turks.  Likewise for Bentivoglio’s ludicrous real estate agent, too wrapped up in his pipe dream of social glory to care that his wife is having contractions.

Though Golino plays the warmest, most likeable character, her Roberta is the bland taste in this recipe. As the haughty arch-capitalist Giovanni Bernaschi, Gifune looks like he stepped off the cover ofClass magazine; as bad as he is (his fund bets against Italy’s economic comeback, for starters), he is granted a human moment or two. Newcomers Gioli and Giovanni Anzaldo (a stage actor who has worked with Alessandro Gassman) inject life into offbeat teen characters and will certainly be heard from again.

Stylish production design by Andrea Bottazzini and Mauro Radaelli  and Carlo Virzi’s highly suspenseful soundtrack complement French cinematographer Jerome Almeras’s visceral vision of northern Italy as something mid-way between a winter wonderland and a cold, heartless world ravaged by bad weather. The film got uninvited pre-release publicity when local politicians loudly protested against it, incensed over its supposedly negative depiction of the region of Brianza.    

   

Venue: Barberini Cinema, Rome, Jan. 9, 2014

Production companies: Indiana Productions, Manny Films, Rai Cinema, Motorino Amaranto

Cast: Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Fabrizio Gifuni, Valeria Golino, Matilde Gioli,Guglielmo Pinelli, Giovanni Anzaldo, Luigi Lo Cascio, Bebo Storti

Director: Paolo Virzi
Screenwriters: Paolo Virzi, Francesco Bruni, Francesco Piccolo based on a novel by Stephen Amidon
Producers:  Marco Cohen, Fabrizio Donvito, Benedetto Habib
Coproducers: Philippe Gompel, Birgit Kemner
Executive producer:  Fabrizio Donvito
Director of photography: Jerome Almeras
Production designers: Andrea Bottazzini, Mauro Radaelli
Costumes:  Bettina Pontiggia
Editor: Cecilia Zanuso
Music: Carlo Virzi
No rating, 116 minutes.

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A slick, stylish drama, “Human Capital” starts as a class critique wrapped around a whodunit, and though the mystery elements have overtaken the social assessment by the final third, the pic remains an engrossing, stinging look at aspirational parvenus and the super-rich they emulate. Perfectly cast with actors who give life to very recognizable Italian types, “Capital” confirms Paolo Virzi as one of the more dynamic directors on the peninsula, blending biting commentary with expert narrational skills. A mid-January Italo run saw returns of around $7.5 million; brisk sales worldwide should bring higher revenues, including Stateside thanks to Film Movement’s recent acquisition.

Virzi’s strongest movies, including “Caterina in the Big City” and “Her Whole Life Ahead,” showcase the helmer’s acute understanding of screenwriting along with sharp criticisms of cold-hearted greed: His message is unabashedly leftist, yet without the divisive feel of more polemical directors (which is why “Human Capital” has been attacked by the far left for not going far enough, and by the right for being overly critical of captains of industry). In adapting Stephen Amidon’s novel, replacing Connecticut with the wealthy region of Brianza, near Milan, Virzi and his co-scripters mine local social mores to make the tale extremely Italian while retaining the novel’s potent message of capitalist greed and the chillingly low price put on human life.

Among the successful changes from the book is a structural one, as the film is divided into chapters, each approaching the story with a different focus. In the prologue, a cyclist is driven off a road at night following a party. Chapter one, “Dino,” begins six months earlier, with Dino (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) dropping off daughter Serena (superb newcomer Matilde Gioli) at her boyfriend’s fancy villa. Dino is an easily recognizable type: an overly congenial chatterer with no awareness of social barriers and a pathological need to be considered a big shot.

Serena’s b.f., Massimiliano (Guglielmo Pinelli) is the son of hedge-fund bigwig Giovanni Bernaschi (Fabrizio Gifuni); when Dino pulls up to the villa, Giovanni is short a tennis partner, and Dino’s hail-fellow-well-met conviviality temporarily appeals to the banking magnate. Giovanni even suggests Dino join his latest fund scheme, with a mere €500,000 (nearly $700,000). Dino, a small-time real-estate agent, so desperately wants to be a part of the Bernaschi circle that he mortgages his business and puts his house up as collateral, all without telling his second wife, Roberta (Valeria Golino), an unpretentious doctor who also happens to be pregnant.

Chapter two is named for Carla (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), Giovanni’s debilitatingly insecure wife. A onetime amateur actress, she’s now little more than a neurotic adjunct to the Bernaschi household, condescendingly indulged by her husband when she sees a dilapidated theater and asks to revive its fortunes. Too easily swayed by those around her, Carla has a brief fling with artistic director Donato (Luigi Lo Cascio); Virzi includes a hilarious, quasi-phantasmagoric scene of the two in her home cinema watching Carmelo Bene’s “Our Lady of the Turks,” skewering Donato’s pretensions along with, quite possibly, Bene’s film.

Chapter three focuses on Serena, unimpressed by the Bernaschi fortune and more interested in troubled artist Luca (Giovanni Anzaldo). Whereas the first two chapters offer pointed criticism of the blithe avarice of the ultra-rich and those hungering for such wealth, the last in the trio feels the need to tie up the mystery of the prologue. The ultimate message, that the lives of “little people” are disposable when power is threatened, is potent, but Virzi needn’t have short-changed the social commentary when shifting the pic into thriller territory.

The performances are flawless, from Bentivoglio’s unthinking, foolish windbag to Gifuni’s patronizing yet superficially charming VIP. Bruni Tedeschi’s overanxious schtick often feels tired in other films, but here her nervous tension is absolutely right, and Gioli is a real find whose down-to-earth intelligence comes through best in the third chapter. Golino’s role is small yet offers a welcome dash of warmth.

French d.p. Jerome Almeras (“The Love Punch,” “The French Minister”) provides coldly handsome visuals that capture the aloof formality of the Bernaschi home, contrasted with looser lensing when Serena is on the scene. Location work around Varese and Como highlights the region’s wealth, luxurious yet heartless. Production design is commendable.