The series “The Mafia Only Kills in Summer” explains Palermo in the 1970s from the perspective of a 10-year-old – with a bit of humor
Salvatore Giammarresi (Edoardo Buscetta) observes a lot in his hometown
When Lorenzo Giammarresi (Claudio Gioe) almost collides with a car, he sees for a brief moment a Mafioso who has just murdered a policeman. “My father had seen something. He was a witness. After death, that was the worst thing that could happen to a good Christian in Palermo,” the narrator sums up this shocking encounter for his father. What should he do now as a good citizen? Go to the police? From now on, his conscience plagues him.
The series “The Mafia Only Kills in Summer”, a sequel to the 2016 film of the same name, tells the story of events in Palermo at the end of the 1970s, when mafia violence escalates, from the perspective of a 10-year-old boy. Salvatore Giammarresi’s (Edoardo Buscetta) family barely manages to make ends meet. His father works as a small office worker, his mother Pia (Anna Foglietta) is a substitute teacher or unemployed. Salvatore’s sister Angela (Angela Curri) is dating the motorcycle-riding professional revolutionary Rosario (Dario Aita) and is annoyed by the family, while Salvatore is unhappily in love with his classmate Alice (Andrea Castellana).
Salvatore meets Inspector Boris Giuliano (Nicola Rignanese), the police chief of Palermo, quite by chance, who is executed by the Mafia a short time later. The same thing happens to the well-known journalist Mario Francese (Roberto Burgio), who writes about the Mafia as a crime reporter in Palermo and comes to Salvatore’s school to talk about journalism.
The legal investigation into his murder did not take place until 2003. “The Mafia Only Kills in Summer” by the Sicilian television presenter, screenwriter, director and actor Pierfrancesco Diliberto, who is also responsible for the film, mixes real history with the fictional story about the contentious but always loyal Giammarresi family.
People fighting against the mafia
Over time, she becomes more and more involved with the mafia without wanting to: whether it’s about little Salvatore’s friendship with his role model Mario Francese or about the loan for a new apartment that the small employee is denied at the bank.
12 episodes from August 2nd on Arte.tv
“The Mafia Only Kills in Summer” completely dispenses with the male aesthetic of violence that is often reproduced so uncritically in mafia films from “The Godfather” to the Netflix series “Narcos”. Instead, the series tells the story of the citizens and how they experience this threat, the violence and the imposed silence in everyday life according to the code of “Omertà”. When the mafia blows up a historic villa because it does not have a demolition permit, the series humorously shows how everyone fails to hear the nighttime explosion. “Was there something there?” several ask. “No, there was nothing there!” is the answer from the spouse in bed and the patrol officer to his colleague.
It is told with a lot of irony and, despite explicit criticism of Sicilian machismo, is sometimes a bit old-fashioned in terms of gender roles. However, the coming-of-age story vividly captures everyday socio-political life in Palermo in the late 1970s, for example when it comes to the poor water supply or the catastrophic employment situation.
Despite the satirical nature, the film manages to adequately stage stirring moments of violence and death and capture an important piece of Italian contemporary history. “The Giammarresi family is us, not just from Palermo, but we Italians, with all our shortcomings, compromises, ambitions and contradictions,” said series creator Pierfrancesco Diliberto to the daily newspaper At the RepublicThe credo of the series is clear: We’ve had enough of the mafia!
