People stuck in the rat race provide realistic show of humanity’s standoff with itself
Paolo Virzi’s Il capitale umano (The Human Capital) was Italy’s entry for Best Foreign Film last year and also the winner of seven David di Donatello awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay — among other prizes in several festivals. And whereas it’s not a groundbreaking feature in aesthetic or narrative terms by any means, it’s equally true that it manages to tell a compelling story in a very effective manner, with no missteps and a handful of good performances.
Adapted from US writer Stephen Amidon’s novel Human Capital, Il capitale umano tells the story of two very different families — one rich one and one middle-class — whose destinies are dramatically intertwined after a cyclist is hit off the road by a person driving a SUV the night before Christmas. Divided into three chapters plus a round-up epilogue, the film tells three stories from different point of views, all of them with the hit-and-run as a common element.
In the first chapter, we meet Dino Ossola (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), a middle-aged real estate agent married to Roberta (Valeria Golino), a psychologist who works in public institutions. Dino’s daughter Serena (Matilde Gioli) is in a relationship with Massimiliano Bernaschi (Guglielmo Pinelli), a well-to-do young man whose father, Giovanni Bernaschi (Fabrizio Gifuni), is a dubious business man into hedge funds.
Seeking to make easy money, Dino invests some 700,000 euros loaned from a bank plus his own savings in a hedge fund. But in the times of an unstable economy, pipe dreams can only be pipe dreams. And Dino is about to find that out sooner rather than later.
The second chapter follows Carla Bernaschi (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), Giovanni’s wife, whose going through some sort of crisis as she finds nothing that can make her feel useful and alive. That is until she’s given the chance to renovate an old theatre (many years ago, she was a passionate amateur actress) and so it seems her life will now take a new turn. Yet, pipe dreams are nothing but pipe dreams.
And the third chapter concerns Serena and her crush on Luca Ambrosini (Giovanni Anzaldo), a young man with a notorious criminal record who nonetheless deep down seems to be a kind, caring person. But Serena is already in a relationship with Massimiliano, so what is she to do now?
It’s best not to disclose how each story will unfold, or how the three are more specifically connected, since the script asks viewers to connect the dots on their own.
That’s where the intrigue of this whodunit lies in, even when Il capitale umano is not just a thriller. It does take on quite a few of the conventions of a thriller, but it does so in order to speak about something else, something far more profound and unsettling.
I’d say that above Paolo Virzi’s feature is a fierce indictment of the wickedness of rampant capitalism and how the human factor is always put in a second, third, or fourth place. A large fortune can turn a man into a cynic, but what’s even worse is that it can make him become indifferent to the pain of others.
Wealth and justice — or the deliberate absence of it — can surely be the best of friends, especially as the financial realm often hides an illegal circle where money makes the world go round, and even if sooner or later someone is bound to bite the dust, the prevailing idea still is to keep moving as much as possible.
That’s where Il capitale humano stands out: in portraying how people, their feelings and their moral values can be irreparably destroyed because of wanting and needing to be the first in the rat race. It’s not a pretty sight, but it certainly is a realistic one.
Production notes
Il capitale umano/ Human Capital (Italy, 2014). Written by Paolo Virzì, Francesco Bruni, Francesco Piccolo. With: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Golino, Fabrizio Gifuni, Luigi Lo Cascio, Giovanni Anzaldo, Matilde Gioli. Cinematography: Jérôme Alméras, Simon Beaufils. Editing: Cecilia Zanuso. Running time: 109 minutes.
