In 2014, while looking at the winners of the European Film Awards, I noticed that an Italian film called The Mafia Kills Only in the Summer , directed by the singularly named Pif, had won under the best comedy category. Intrigued by the title, I proceeded to look it up and found that Pif is short for Pierfrancesco Diliberto, who had a popular show on MTV Italy. In keeping with my long-standing practice of not reading anything beforehand about films that I have some intention of watching, I did no further research and when it became available, ordered the DVD. Something or the other came up during the next several months, and the film sat there, looking at me accusingly while I watched a great number of other films ranging in quality from greatness to filth.
When I finally caught up with it, I was astounded. Narrated by the adult Arturo (played by Pif), the story is mostly as seen through the eyes of the young Arturo from the 1970s to the 1990s as he grows up in Palermo, Sicily (Pif is from Palermo) as the Cosa Nostra (Sicilian mafia) proceeds to assassinate a great number of rivals and officials. If that makes it sound grim, it is not. The narrative frame is the young Arturo’s yearning for his schoolmate Flora and everything is coloured by this lens alongside that of the boy’s hero worship of the then Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. The tone is blackly comic — in the same ballpark as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove... — and the film nimbly swings between warm fuzzy moments to chilling reality. For verisimilitude, the film uses television news footage from that period and inserts characters into real life historical events (the cinematographer shot these on beta to get a similar feel), like in Woody Allen’s Zelig . The result is an utterly winning film that charms and entertains while providing a potted history of the mafia activities of that time. And incredibly, Pif and his editor keep the running time at a crisp 90 minutes without it feeling breathless. For a first-time director (he was apprenticed to Marco Tullio Giordana during his mafia drama One Hundred Steps ), this is a feat.
For those with any serious interest in the Italian mafia, the journalist Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah , where he lays bare the secrets of the Neapolitan mafia, and consequently lives under armed guard, is a must-read. Matteo Garrone’s masterly film of the book is a must-watch, and if you have the patience, the television series too. But The Mafia Kills Only in the Summer is a great entry point to the genre. And, for a lighter touch, Andrea Camilleri’s Il Commissario Montalbano series of books and the attendant television series will transport you to a fictionalised Sicily where the titular inspector’s zeal in solving crime (often related to the mafia, expectedly) is matched only by his zest in consuming local delicacies — with the proviso that no one must speak while he is eating. Bravissimo! (And no, I’m not referring to the British lingerie brand here).
