The Mafia is No Longer What It Used to Be (Franco Maresco, 2019) (Patreon)

Franco Maresco is a filmmaker I'm shamefully behind on, and so his newest film seemed like a good place to start catching up. He doesn't have a huge international profile, but he is a major figure in Italy. Reportedly, when The Mafia is No Longer What It Used to Be won a special jury prize at this year's Venice Film Festival, the Italian press went wild. Others were just a bit bemused, many of them not having seen the film at all.

For years, Maresco worked with his former partner, Daniele Ciprì, both men hailing from Palermo and working together on three feature films and dozens of documentaries from 1988 through 2007. From there, Ciprì became an independent director and cinematographer, and Maresco began making his own documentaries, most notably Belluscone: a Sicilian Story (2014). In certain respects, Mafia is a spinoff from that film, focusing much of its running time on someone who was a relatively marginal figure in that film.

His name is Ciccio Mira, and he is an aging impressario and party promoter. For decades he has been a hanger-on to the Sicilian mob, organizing parties, meetings, and public events for various members of the Cosa Nostra. But then, when Maresco catches up with him, Ciccio apparently feels he has been wronged by the Mafia, and has decided he wants nothing more to do with them. So we find him organizing a concert commemorating the deaths of anti-Mafia crusaders Falcone and Borsellino. This proves comically difficult, since virtually no one wants to take to a public stage and even utter the words "down with the Mafia."

Maresco contrasts Ciccio's cowardice and venality with the fearlessness of Letizia Battaglia, a photojournalist who has been documenting atrocities committed by the Italian Mafia for nearly thirty years. She is part of an independent leftist press that, often to the chagrin of Berlusconi, has taken a hard line against the mob and its infiltration of Italian politics. While Maresco toggles back and forth between Battaglia's late career exploits and Ciccio's hapless organizing (always showing Ciccio in black and white, as if through Battaglia's lens), the two come together at the Falcone and Borsellino show. 

The contrast is clear: she represents the men's true legacy; he is a caricature of it. Maresco, for his part, stands back and displays contemporary Sicilian culture as a strange contest between the two, one mediated by generational amnesia, big business, and decades of empty spectacle masquerading as populism. As the film shows, the chips are down, but the fight isn't over.