One of the dullest films I saw in 2013 was a film called
Salvo directed by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza. I looked it up before
the screening, only to find that it received multiple awards at the Cannes film
festival. This, I figured, was reason enough for me to choose it over the other
five films playing simultaneously at CIFF 2013. However, this choice misfired
terribly.
Salvo’s plot is wafer-thin. A gangster named Salvo and his
boss go to another part of town to kill select people. Why they do it, what
they have at stake, what this is in response to-- we are given none of these
details. Instead, the film-maker chooses to focus on the more trivial details; like what time Salvo sets his alarm, what his servants think of him, whether
his hostage girl is hungry and whether fish tastes better in a dog bowl.
