Skinheads

Marco is sick of his moronic friends and he is fed up with his mother nagging him about getting a job. The boy next doOl·, nicknamed ''The FOhrer'', recruits Marco into a group of neo-nazis. Marco shaves his head and becomes a skinhead, a ''testa rasata''. Concurrently with Marco's acceptance of his new ideology the relation to his neighbour's Somalian helper Zaira deteriorates.

COMMENTARY
Marco is unemployed, fatherless and apathetic. With no male role model, and stuck wtih a single mother who is nagging him about doing something worthwhile instead of smoking joints, he is a grateful victim of the neo-nazi recruiting campaign. That is the sum total of Claudio Fragasso's film about a growing Italian social problem. The pattern readily translates to most European countries, and it is staged with educational clarity. Marco is a searcher and slightly stupid, the leader of the shaved heads is a demonic intelligence who devours souls whole and spits out the remains with a satisfied grin. Fragasso's way of stirring up old myths of nazi mysticism is questionable.
Marco himself is portrayed as a Faustian character, and the Italian boys' own suburban fOhrer is presented as the devil himself, a kind of emanation rather than a human being. The susceptible boys, including Marco, fall immediately and passionately in love, a feeling that is kept alive through homoerotic physical excercises in the gym.
What is interesting about the film is the
ambivalence with which Marco begins a passionate love affair with a Somalian cleaner, parallel to his equally passionate admittance into the racist commando. The forceful denial of love and hatred across racial borders even being a problem. Fragasso also manages to shock at the bloody ending of the film, when the fanaticism grows stronger than the will to survive. This is when the devil is exposed as a treacherous impostor, a deceiver always on the look-out for new souls. And Marco, who chose hatred before love, is spit out. ':'
Cecilia Sjoholm

Orig. titel
Teste rasate: Medverkande
Gianmarco Tognazzi, Franca Bettoja: Producent
Carmine de Benedittis: Manus
Rossella Drudi: Foto
Luigi Ciccarese: Musik
Eugenio Bennato & Sergio Cammariere: Talat språk
Italian