Executive Overview
The eternal debate surrounding an artist’s ethical responsibilities toward marginalized communities has resurfaced with visceral intensity following the release of Edoardo Gabbriellini’s The City of the Living. The film, an adaptation of Nicola Lagioia’s true-crime novel, chronicles the harrowing real-life murder of Luca Varani, a 23-year-old working-class Roman whose life was brutally cut short a decade ago by two drug-addled men.
On artistic merits alone, The City of the Living represents a career-best achievement for Gabbriellini. It is a visually arresting, heartrending piece of cinema that avoids the cheap sensationalism typical of the true-crime genre. Instead, it meticulously constructs a multifaceted, deeply human portrait of its protagonist, his devoted girlfriend, and his grieving parents.
However, the film’s brilliance is counterbalanced by a glaring narrative blind spot. While Gabbriellini handles Luca and his family with profound empathy, he falls into a well-trodden cinematic trap: reducing his antagonists to little more than manifestations of psychopathic behavior and queer deviance. In an Italian sociopolitical landscape where positive LGBTQ+ media representation remains sparse and homophobic violence is routinely underreported, the absence of any balancing queer perspective turns a masterpiece of empathy into a frustrating study of partial vision. This article explores the artistic triumph of The City of the Living, the complexities of adapting true crime, and the critical responsibility filmmakers bear when portraying marginalized groups within narratives of darkness.
Detailed Chronology
The Real-World Tragedy: Rome, 2016
To understand the gravity of Gabbriellini’s project, one must revisit the grim reality that inspired it. Ten years ago, the Italian capital was shaken to its core by a crime of almost unfathomable sadism. Luca Varani, a 23-year-old Roman navigating the precarious economic realities of the working class, was lured into an apartment in the city’s northern district.
Varani was a regular guy—a "working-class regular Roman Joe"—trying to secure a stable future for himself and his partner. He worked alongside his adoptive father, Giuseppe, on their itinerant gewgaw truck, peddling brightly colored trinkets and candies along roadsides and outside regional amusement parks. To improve his prospects, he attended night school, though he often found the curriculum stifling.
On that fateful night, Varani crossed paths with Andreas, a gay-for-pay escort who introduced him to a world of easy money. This introduction led Varani to an apartment occupied by two men whose names would soon become synonymous with senseless brutality. Over the course of hours, Varani was subjected to a level of torture that tested the very bounds of human cruelty. The ensuing trial captivated and horrified the Italian public, exposing the dark underbelly of a metropolis where wealth, drug addiction, and alienation occasionally intersect with lethal results.
Adaptation and Artistic Choice
When author Nicola Lagioia set out to write his true-crime novel La città dei vivi, he probed deeply into the psychology of the killers and the systemic failures that allowed the tragedy to occur. Translating this nightmare to the screen presented Gabbriellini with an immense challenge: how to depict a crime of such extreme violence without exploiting it.
Gabbriellini makes the prudent, ethical choice to condense the horror. Rather than indulging in the visceral, bloody carnage that characterized the final hours of Varani’s life, the director pulls back. He focuses instead on the pre-tragedy rhythm of Luca’s life and the catastrophic shockwaves the murder sends through his surviving family members.
The film introduces us to Luca (portrayed with astonishing authenticity by Emanuele Maria Di Stefano) and his adoptive parents, Silvana (Simona Senzacqua) and Giuseppe (Valerio Mastandrea). Living in a nondescript neighborhood on the outskirts of Rome, the family embodies the quintessential "bridge and tunnel" demographic—individuals who occasionally venture into the glittering city center but remain culturally and economically detached from its diverse, bourgeois pulse.
Through a series of brilliantly understated scenes, Gabbriellini establishes the emotional stakes. An early argument between Luca and his girlfriend, Marta (Gaia Merlonghi), ostensibly sparked by something as trivial as choosing a restaurant, organically reveals the underlying relationship dynamics and traditional gender roles prevalent in modern Italy. When Luca drops out of night school to seek full-time employment so he and Marta can finally move in together, the audience is fully invested in his fragile, ordinary dreams.
Supporting Context & Metrics
The True-Crime Genre and the Trap of the "Queer Monster"
Gabbriellini’s misstep in The City of the Living is not unprecedented. Film history is littered with works that weaponize marginalized identities as shorthand for moral corruption. The controversy surrounding Buffalo Bill in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs—where the serial killer’s gender-nonconforming identity became a lightning rod for criticism from LGBTQ+ activists—proved that artistic mastery does not insulate a project from accusations of perpetuating harmful tropes.
In The City of the Living, the two murderers are depicted as wealthy, drug-addled, and defiantly queer. One is an escort; the other is a flamboyant, coke-snorting crossdresser whose very aura radiates calculated malice. While true-crime narratives are bound by the historical facts of their subjects, cinematic choices regarding framing are entirely subjective.
As critics and cultural analysts have noted, the problem is not that the killers happen to be gay. A psychopath is a psychopath, regardless of sexual orientation. The issue arises from a severe representational imbalance. In a medium where queer characters are historically over-represented as villains, sociopaths, or tragic victims, the complete absence of a counter-balancing, positive gay character in The City of the Living creates an artistic vacuum.
Media Representation and Social Realities in Italy
To fully grasp why this oversight stings, one must examine the broader Italian cultural ecosystem. Despite progressive strides in urban centers like Milan and Rome, Italy lags behind much of Western Europe regarding legal protections and social acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals. Data compiled by advocacy groups such as Gay Center consistently highlight underreported levels of homophobic aggression, workplace discrimination, and societal marginalization.
When national media and prestigious art-house cinema repeatedly link queerness with extreme deviance and psychopathy—even when rooted in a true story—it reinforces pernicious societal biases. For viewers attuned to these dynamics, the film’s narrow lens transforms a universally tragic story into an inadvertent reinforcement of historical stigmas.
Official Statements & Director’s Intent
In the official pressbook distributed at the film’s premiere, director Edoardo Gabbriellini articulated his artistic philosophy with striking clarity:
"Cinema, like literature, has the great power of empathy and thus the ability to lead us to see through a lens that, if properly focused, avoids any facile or preconceived judgment."
There is no doubt that Gabbriellini successfully applied this dictum to Luca, Marta, Silvana, and Giuseppe. Even the immigrant community, fleetingly glimpsed alongside Luca during his night-school classes, is afforded a fleeting dignity that acknowledges their place within the broader tapestry of urban humanity.
Yet, this artistic manifesto highlights the blind spot in the director’s execution. By his own logic, empathy should be deployed to avoid preconceived judgments. While the murderers themselves certainly merit no sympathetic lens—having forfeited their humanity through acts of unspeakable cruelty—the vast, diverse community of queer individuals to which they nominally belong deserved better than being utilized as aesthetic shorthand for pure evil.
Lagioia, who co-wrote the screenplay based on his own literary work, defends the structural integrity of the adaptation by pointing to the journalistic fidelity required by true crime. Yet, critics argue that a minor narrative adjustment—such as the inclusion of a secondary, positive queer character within Rome’s vibrant social fabric—would have entirely neutralized the imbalance without compromising the historical integrity of the central tragedy.
Future Outlook
As The City of the Living continues its festival run and prepares for broader theatrical distribution, it is destined to provoke fierce discussions in film studies classrooms and cultural forums alike.
Can a film be an artistic triumph and a sociological misstep simultaneously? The City of the Living proves that the answer is an emphatic yes. Gabbriellini has crafted his finest cinematic work to date—a film that wisely refuses to offer tidy psychological theories for inexplicable evil, plunging audiences without judgment into the heartrending grief of a working-class family destroyed by a senseless crime.
The heartbreak experienced by Luca’s parents as they confront the vacuum left by his absence is universally resonant, powerful enough to move the hardest of hearts. But as the cinematic landscape evolves, the standards by which we judge representation are shifting, too. Future filmmakers tackling true-crime narratives involving marginalized perpetrators will need to navigate this tightrope with greater care, ensuring that their pursuit of narrative focus does not come at the expense of an entire community’s humanity.
