A Quiet Life (Una Vita Tranquilla) (6/10)

December 15th, 2011

A very European pot-boiler, A Quiet Life is the story of a man dedicated to leaving his past behind him. Fifteen years behind him. Fifteen years since he killed anyone behind him. An Italian living in Germany, with German wife and German kid, he looks to have succeeded. And then two men enter his hotel, and his past is his past no longer.

He calls himself Rosario Russo now – not his real name – and in a small town near Wiesbaden he, and the restaurant he named after himself, is well-known. Whether this is a good idea or not is open to debate, but it tells you a little about his character perhaps. His wife has no idea of his past, Russo having reinvented himself completely when he fled Italy, so she’s not the least bit suspicious when two young Italian men arrive on their doorstep. Russo knows one of the men but not the other. He looks worried, and worried he should be, considering that no one’s supposed to know that he’s here.

At just about an hour and three quarters, A Quiet Life has plenty of time to set up its characters and motivations. Russo (a very good Toni Servillo) is well-defined, once you realise who he used to be. His restaurant is a proxy of his former surroundings, with him at the helm barking orders and concentrating on the details. There’s a suggestion that he had an affair, a detail unimportant to the story but works as a reminder of his talent for duplicity. Still, his wife and tousle-haired boy love him, and even in their wildest dreams they could never imagine the reason for the visit.

What of the two young men? Diego (Marco d’Amore) is the sensible one, keeping his cards close to his chest and his profile low, and Edoardo (Francesco Di Leva, perhaps the film’s highlight) is the other, who does the exact opposite. Our first thought is that the pair might be gay – that is, until we see Edoardo’s passion for hotel maid Doris, who is considerably more attractive than her name might suggest. (Apologies to any Dorises reading this.) No, they are not gay. They are here to kill someone.

A Simple Life has considerably less action than you would think, given the subject matter, and is more concerned with character than gunfire. Specifically, it is about Russo’s enforced decision to up sticks and flee his homeland, fearing (rightly) that he was being targeted. Is it possible to reinvent yourself? Can you keep it all to yourself? Is looking over your shoulder consistently any way to live? Cronenberg’s 2005 A History of Violence posed the same question, you will recall, and that movie’s answer was no, you couldn’t. Events will bring Russo’s inner character back to the surface and his survival skills to the fore; like riding a bike, though, you never really forget how.

If foreboding’s your thing, this is the movie for you. Stubbornly European, it runs the risk of alienating audiences that read only its gang-boss premise and expect a different film entirely. Russo was a bad man turned good and, as the film’s central figure, you could be forgiven for siding with him. Oscar Wilde said ‘One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged’. Director Claudio Cupellini and writer Filippo Gravino agree.