Human Capital

The opening shots are high angle looking down first on post-festive detritus, then on the driveway of a lavish estate. Is this a bird’s eye view or that of the gods? Paolo Virzi’s drama is about a venal, godless society. Its opening perspective is the vulture’s.

The title phrase is explained in an end title. It’s the compensation calculation an insurance company makes for a dead person’s survivors, based on age, earning potential and emotional bonds. Until then it’s an implicit metaphor for the reduction of people to commodities, to be bought and sold, invested with and abandoned.

Across the social range the characters reveal a predatory humanity (if that were not a contradiction in terms). At the low end the impetuous young druggie Luca appears to have been exploited by his rough, seedy but ostensibly protective uncle. Luca took the rap on a drug possession charge. At the high end Giovanni Bernaschi lives opulently on his profits from a notoriously successful hedge fund. In the middle, a small real estate company owner and eternal patsy Dino wants a big score. Taking advantage of his daughter Serena’s relationship with Giovanni’s son Massimiliano, Dino coaxes him to let him invest 700,000 euros in the fund, all of which he borrows, reducing his business and risking his house as collateral.

Once he has hooked his prey Giovanni’s friendship with Dino oddly cools. Then two disasters strike.

The first disaster — for the hedge fund that thrives by selling short, counting on companies’ failures — is a surprisingly buoyant economy. Gino’s holding shrinks to 70,000 and his public psychologist wife announces she’s pregnant. Blessings can be afflictions. Then Massimiliano gets bombed at a party and his family’s SUV causes a fatal collision with a bicyclist. The hedge fund is threatened with bankruptcy and Massi seems set for jail. His only alibi is Serena’s insistence that she drove him home. A reduction in the Bernaschis’ social circle looms.  

Dino finds the truth on his daughter’s email. She’s covering for Luca, who driving back the SUV hit the cyclist. As any responsible father and citizen would do, Dino threatens to destroy this evidence and let Massimiliano carry the can to the can unless Giovanni pays 980,000 euros (his investment plus 40% profit) into Dino’s new Swiss account — and wife Carla Bernaschi gives Dino “a real kiss — on the mouth.” 

So everyone gets a happy ending — especially when (oh joy) the economy collapses and the short-selling hedge fund triumphs. There is no mention of the ordinary folk whose lives are ruined when the economy collapses. Even Luca, whose arrest curtails his suicide attempt, serves out his manslaughter sentence and has Serena waiting for him. 

The victims are as clear as the vultures. Wife Carla is a complicitous victim bird in her gilded cage, subject to her husband’s demands and exclusions. He promises to fund her resurrection of an old theatre, then sells it for condos instead. She’s again victimized when the theatre professor she makes her artistic director exploits her vulnerability for a one-night stand, then vituperates her for refusing to have an affair. Then she has to kiss the repulsive Dino, who starts out a victim then gloriously grows into a vulture, profiting from others’ tragedies. 

     The only solid characters are Dino’s partner and his daughter Serena. They by reflex and faithfully protect the victims they meet. Only they genuinely care for anyone but themselves.
      The original novel was set in Connecticut, but it translates well to Northern Italy. It probably would work as revealingly in any Western society and in the Chinese and Russian oligarchies, that is, anywhere in capitalism.