A new mafia series from Italy: Amazon Prime is now showing “Bang Bang Baby” with Arianna Becheroni as a student who suddenly murders.
The series Bang Bang Baby begins in northern Italy in 1986 with an initiation ritual for young Alice into the mafia. In the meantime, she tells from the off why it had to come to this and that it all started three months ago – for love. Out of love for her supposedly dead father. Then the action jumps back three months and we see Alice think she recognizes her father in a newspaper photo – it’s the article about an arrest. Jumping back in time, Alice is just a kid riding the funfair with her mother on the swing carousel when the father standing and waiting below is shot.
The memory comes back and threatens to pull Alice into the pain, but then the teenager becomes active, secretly drives against the mother’s wishes to the grandmother, who is clearly a mafia boss, and confronts her with her suspicions. On the same day she can visit her father in prison and receives an assignment from him. The Italian mafia series Bang Bang Baby (Amazon Prime) starring Arianna Becheroni as Alice is packed with 1980’s and late 70’s pop culture props. Against this colorful background, she focuses on a brutal coming-of-age story in which the heroine has to grow up and defend herself within a few weeks. Already at the end of the first episode, Alice has a gun, but also a corpse around her neck.
Bang Bang Baby with the coming of age of a female teenager at the center of the plot, with the use of a gun and with the ambivalent relationship to the criminal father is not alone with this plot. The British series “Two Weeks to live” with Maisie Williams in the leading role already set the direction, albeit with a lot more black humor than “Bang Bang Baby”. jw
April 28, 2022 // Jürgen Wittner
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