Good News

"You look mean. You’re mean inside. You woke up looking mean and you’re dying to take it out on somebody,” says the attractive Fedora (Angela Molina) to her somewhat older husband (Giancarlo Giannini). The nameless man works at an anonymous Rome-based TV station where his job description involves constantly watching a half dozen TV sets broadcasting news reports about assassinations, murders, and other unpleasantness. He’s a paranoid neurotic troubled by his own sexuality and by the fear of death and the dark. One day, an old but long-unseen friend, Gualtiero, tracks the couple down in order to confide his fears that someone is planning to kill him. This biting, blackly-humorous meditation is the last film Petri shot before cancer prematurely ended his life. After the unsuccessful Property Is No Longer a Theft and the unfortunate fate of the prophetic yet accursed Todo modo, the filmmaker had become disillusioned about the ability of film to artistically capture reality and to communicate with the viewer. Good News is Petri’s last cinematic testament – a film playing out in a grim-looking Rome full of people behaving like animals, on sidewalks strewn with litter, and to the incessant deafening blare of police sirens. Drawing on a melancholy sarcasm, Petri depicts the pessimism and disillusion he felt when regarding a society voluntarily drowning in consumerism. His unjustly forgotten final work contains a comprehensive and hard-hitting analysis of a society facing its own ruin, and even after 35 years it’s lost not one iota of its relevance.