La giostra dei criceti

The hamster carousel recounts a robbery and grand scheme. Four thugs of the Roman mala, René, Franco, Cinese, and Cencio, set up a bank robbery, but something goes wrong. Meanwhile in the palaces of power, in the offices of the Treasury Ministry, some bureaucrats organize a hallucinatory plot to drastically solve the pension problem. Between these two seemingly out of touch worlds, between the center and the periphery, at the top and the bottom of the social ladder, everyone is looking for the same thing: the ultimate big score, the one that fixes you forever. In Manzini’s world, evil, violence, vulgarity, conceit, spare no one. Whether it is an Inps employee who thinks he is a vigilante, the generals of the Secret Service, dark and unmentionable characters, the most ramshackle small-time bandits. Dictating the action is always the fever of wealth, the eagerness of the sneak, the mirage of the “breakthrough.” No one is really a decent person, a citizen in good standing, not even the elderly pensioners who on the strength of a secure monthly allowance think only of themselves, or the resentful young people. Everyone is trying to outwit the other, just to stay ahead, just to grab an advantage in the struggle for survival. There is running and chasing each other, like on a wheel, between comic and tragic, comedy and noir. Toward the final bang.