To put Mosco Levi Boucault’s brutal but endlessly fascinating Sicilian mob documentary into perspective, first, let’s just say that few (if any) fictional TV and movie versions of mob violence even come close to faithfully depicting the kind of utter widespread carnage that psychopathic mob boss Riina inflicted on the city of Palermo in the 1980s and 1990s.
The feel of Boucault’s two-part series feels sweeping and epic in a way few crime-related documentaries do (the grand scale and dramatic tension of 1999’s One Day in September come to mind), and the director masterfully sets up two hotly competing narratives—one told by the prosecution and the other told by the still-surviving soldiers of Riina’s, the ones who carried out their boss’s bloody bidding with ice-cold precision and quiet ruthlessness.
The nonchalance and complete lack of remorse on the part of these soldier interviewees is bone-chilling, to say the least: they carried out hundreds of hits—gunning their victims down, strangling them in “death chambers,” or blowing them up—and they all recall these inhuman deeds, almost waxing nostalgic about the casual massacres they carried out on a regular basis.
In fact, the film begins with a bang—Sicily’s own “9/11,” as it is referred to in the film—in which Riina’s henchmen load a shopping cart with high explosives, push it under a major highway and detonate it just as a prominent prosecutor and his wife drive past.
From Riina’s humble beginnings as a peasant farmer in Corleone, Sicily, his ascendance up the mafia career ladder kicked off a career in violent crime—the violent acts gradually escalating in brutality until the bloody crescendo of the early 90s, when it seemed no lawmaker or state official (or anyone else for that matter) in Palermo was safe from mob violence.
Perhaps most importantly, unlike most fictional depictions of mobsters—from Brando’s Don Corleone to TV’s Tony Soprano—Boucault’s two-part documentary series wholly rejects any hint of Hollywood-style glamorizing of the mob. This is an unforgettable, endlessly disturbing portrait of a man who, for all his power and wealth, was little more than a psychopathic serial murderer who would eventually die in prison but live to see his long-held crime syndicate completely dismantled by the mid-1990s. Highly Recommended. Aud: C.