The TV series The Mafia Only Kills in Summer/La Mafia Uccide Solo d’Estate (Pif, 2016) starts with a bang: the local priest takes aim at a squawking hawk, as it circles with one eye over Palermo in the full midday sun. He misses – the bird gets a narrow escape. It’s a fitting metaphor for the Giammarresi family central to this Italian crime dramedy, when the youngest son Salvatore starts to question the effects of the mafia in a city where – we are told repeatedly – La mafia non esiste. Curiosity kills in 1970s Sicily. All of this misses the fact that as an opening scene, it’s a lot of fun. Mid-lockdown, it will have my own mother squawking like a bird in our living room while my grown-up sister points a finger-gun at each of us in turn – Bang! – and I run around the room like a spinning top to the farcical sounds of its typically Sicilian theme music. The soundtrack, courtesy of Santi Pulvirenti, who also worked on the homonymous film from 2013, plays up the satirical, darkly comical edge of the series. Created and narrated by Palermo-native Pierfrancesco ‘Pif’ Diliberto, the show not only tries to recreate what life was like for ordinary people of the period, but also chooses to ridicule the mobsters who we have come to recognize in their idealized Scorsese variety. As a strategy, it’s in line with more somber recent adaptations of mafia history, like 2018’s Il Cacciatore/ The Hunter (Silvia Ebreul) which aimed to make the prosecutors ‘cool’ again as the rightful protagonists of the mafia genre. Pif’s mafiosi are not criminal masterminds. Unsophisticated and brutal, yes, but also the stupid and openly laughable foils to young Salvuccio’s curious mind. Our sympathies lie entirely with the Giammarresi family from the get-go, whether it’s the hedonist-realist Uncle Massimo who tries to cheat the system as best he can, or the wonderfully intense mother Pia, a teacher who has been waiting patiently for years for a teaching post only to be consistently skipped by applicants with the virtue of a ‘raccomandazione’ (code for: a word from someone important). Then there are the many romances of his oblivious sister Angela, who follows a boyfriend into the world of student Marxism – ‘Karl Marx is dead?!’ – and finally the well-meaning father Lorenzo, who tries hard to play by the rules in an absurdly corrupt world. The result? A near constant state of moral anxiety. The series is rich, in humour and in heart. But aside from the family portrait, it has the parallel task of educating us as to the mafia killings that took place in the 70s and 80s with the help of real footage. The show’s unerringly respectful treatment of such tragedies as the killings of anti-mafia magistrates Gaetano Costa and Rocco Chinnici, police chief Boris Giuliano, as well as ordinary Sicilians caught in the crossfire alongside the fictional Giammarresi, is perhaps its greatest achievement. All of this finds balance within a delightfully hammy Italian comedic style which could have come straight out of 1970s television. Mainly thanks to this balancing act, however, Pif’s irreverent series feels entirely new. All of this begs the question: are we allowed to enjoy La Mafia when it appears on our screens? If director and outspoken anti-mafia journalist Pif is to be believed, we can even have fun with it – as long as we know exactly who and what we’re laughing at, we can even start taking television like this seriously.
Lucy McCabe
