‘The City of the Living’ Review: A Superbly Acted and Heartbreakingly Real Story Based on a Real Event That Shook Rome to Its Core — SkimNews
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- Edoardo Gabbriellini directed "The City of the Living," adapting Nicola Lagioia's true crime novel about the 2014 murder of 23-year-old Luca Varani in Rome by two gay men, with the film focusing on Luca's life rather than the carnage.
- Emanuele Maria Di Stefano stars as Luca — a working-class Roman who sells knickknacks from his father's truck and attends night school — opposite Valerio Mastandrea as adoptive father Giuseppe and Simona Senzacqua as mother Silvana.
- Nicola Lagioia wrote both the source novel and the screenplay, which the reviewer calls "largely excellent" for its character-driven focus that organically conveys relationships through interactions rather than exposition.
- Luca is drawn into a gay-for-pay world after meeting Andreas, a male escort played by Andrea Isidori, near Rome's Termini station, with the film hinting at his sexuality as "embryonic" rather than fixed.
- The review criticizes the film for defining its gay characters only by their sexuality and sadism, arguing that in a country with underreported homophobic aggression, even one positive gay character would have balanced the representation.
- Gabbriellini is called out for forgetting that "the gay community, routinely demonized, also needed at least a scrap of empathy," despite his pressbook dictum that cinema should help viewers "avoid any facile or preconceived judgment."
- The film is described as Gabbriellini's "best movie to date" — superbly acted and emotionally invested in its protagonist — making the representational blind spot more conspicuous than it would be in a lesser film.
Why it matters: The review spotlights a tension specific to Italian cinema: when adapting a real crime involving a marginalized group, does fidelity to the facts absolve filmmakers of representational responsibility? With Italy's documented levels of underreported homophobic aggression, the review argues that Lagioia's otherwise excellent script needed even one positive queer character to avoid reinforcing stigma — a critique that lands harder precisely because the film is technically accomplished.
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