The Choice to See: Salvo

“The choice not to see is the easiest.” Antonio Piazza, co-director of Salvo tells me. And you have to admire a man who quotes Italo Calvino, “...who in his book Invisible Cities says that in the inferno of the living ‘There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.’ This is what Salvo and Rita try to do when they slowly and painfully discover each other.”  This philosophical pondering could be seen as a purple-prosed synopsis of his debut film.

A more literal take is that it’s a subverted gangster tale that contravenes expectation.  Salvo, a mafioso killer, encounters the blind sister of one of his victims, and is tested, morally conflicted and possibly saved. This first meeting between them (the ‘miracle’ Antonio tells me) – a hugely extended, delicate choreography of sound and movement – is a true statement of intent, a signifier that we are viewing something contrary to genre norms.  I suggest to Piazza that this is a brave, challenging decision. “As a matter of fact, the long extended scenes seem to be one of the things the audience enjoys most in our film, especially the long takes at the beginning when Salvo sneaks into Rita's house to kill her brother and has to wait, while Rita slowly becomes aware of the intruder's presence in her house. The whole story of Salvo and Rita was shot as a dance... while their bodies slowly start to accept the presence of the other also their souls begin to change.”  This metamorphosis is largely realised through image and sound design, infused with meaning too important and meaty to require the trimmings of words.  

“Salvo is a killer... he is like a silent samurai. He does not speak if it is not strictly necessary. And the peculiar love story between him and Rita has an archaic tone. It is a basic sentimental education, they start to care for each other by doing very basic things. Salvo provides water and food... he would never be able to say ‘I love you.’” Through her impaired vision he is a silhouette, a ghost (as emotionally he appears to us), and this is only one example of their design of sensory metaphor. “The noises and sounds therefore play a major narrative role, because these are what guide and give meaning to Rita’s world. Consequently the balance between what the eye sees in the film and what the ear hears changes as the story develops and includes Rita’s point of view, which will increasingly match Salvo’s and through his find its completeness.”

It’s a film that draws on the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, most notably referencing the opening of Le Samouraï in Salvo’s establishing shot, but also the confident silence and composition of another beginning, Un Flic, and its wordlessly realised bank robbery. It also rubs close to John Woo; a juxtaposed white dove marks violent death. Spaghetti western, classic noir, Salvo reflects both but plunders nothing; it's very much its own film. A genre insurrection, a manipulation of movement and pace, a symbolic meeting and joining, finally and essentially a commentary on the maker’s native Sicily. “Together they get a glimpse of the distant shimmering light of freedom. There is hope as well, although it does not belong to the society as a whole but only to specific human beings.”