**SPOILER WARNING**

This year, as opposed to the previous one, I have engagements that prevent me from attending all the films being screened as part of The Malta International Film Festival. Therefore I have to choose amongst the titles on offer. Paolo Sorrentino's L'Amico di Famiglia would not have been one of them if it hadn't been screened on the particular day, as I was uncharacteristically free of commitments. Good for me.

The film is splendid. Commencing from the initial sequence, a staggering mosaic of images accompanying the heart-wrenching crooning of Antony and the Johnsons, the film is a relentless bombardment of poetry in motion.

Admittedly, I am not as familiar as I should be with Italian cinema; a crime seeing that I understand the language perfectly and was exposed to the culture all my life. Nonetheless, Sorrentino's film reminded me a lot of another great film by another great Italian director, Bernardo Bertolucci's La Strategia Del Ragno (1970). But that would be another post for another time.

Geremia de Geremei (a fabulous Giacomo Rizzo) is a small time loan shark who looks like the offspring of Quasimodo and Ebenezer Scrooge. He trots about (at one point he is described as 'un topo', a mouse) from one business transaction to another, perennially carrying an inconsequential white plastic bag in his plaster cast hand. He is a tailor, which profession he uses as a cover-up for his illicit activity. He lives together with his bed-ridden mother (Clara Bindi) in a filthy, run-down apartment. And he is rich.

Geremia is a hoarder. Just as a rodent stashes food for the coming winter, Geremia puts his money safely away. But for Geremia winter is constantly looming and fails to notice the blooming spring around him. He is cynic to the point that he does not enjoy the fruits of his labour. He is a man who refuses to dream; instead he covets, a poor substitute that raises hope only to have it mercilessly crushed.

Geremia is exactly in this kind of situation. He is not happy with his life but on the other hand is not willing to do anything to ameliorate it. His bed-ridden mother is ballast that keeps him firmly anchored to his miserable existence (reminiscent of Darlene Cates, in Lasse Hallström's What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993)); as is his ambition of bettering his father in the loan sharking business (his father abandoned him when he was a little boy). Geremia has a better-the-devil-you-know attitude that prevents him from taking risks and look for something better. He makes an effort to push people away, even the ones he likes.

Sex is shown in a dirty and vulgar light. Geremia longs for youth and abuses his position by making lewd advances on the young women who owe him money. He is incapable of having a consensual relationship with the opposite sex mainly due to his self-defeatist attitude (he refers to himself as ugly and hideous on more than one occasion.) Sex is experienced from a safe distance, with no involvement and commitment, such as in his peeping at the volleyball players or the nudist sunbathers. Geremia's sick soul is magnificently portrayed in the Felliniesque sequence of the burlesque overweight whore trying to imitate the said athletes.

No wonder Rosalba (Laura Chiatti) found it so easy to deceive him. She embodied his ideals: beautiful, young, submissive and caring. A trophy, a mother and a lover.