Unlike his wife, he’s not willing to simply believe his son’s story but literally forces him to tell the truth, but by the end of the film he’s forgotten all about principles and honesty, and is willing to do anything whatsoever to prevent his son falling into the hands of the law. I found the change in Paolo much less convincing, however. He’s obviously shocked at the discovery of what his daughter’s really like and what sort of monster he’s released into the world, and becomes determined to redeem himself by ‘doing the right thing’. I found the transformation of Massimo quite believable, especially following the powerful scene in which he overhears the children talking about what they’ve done, laughing at it and fantasising that they could have gone further. There we see a strange reversal of positions, as Massimo, the ‘unscrupulous’ bourgeois lawyer, finally develops a highly principled attitude to the case of his daughter, while the overworked paediatric surgeon Paolo, who is morally scrupulous, socially engaged and slightly more down to earth and working-class (or at least more informal – he doesn’t like wearing a tie), ends up willing to do whatever is necessary to protect his son from the possibility of prison.
Important plot details might be revealed beyond this point… There are still big differences between the two films though, and this one concentrates less on the crime itself than on the changing relationships within and between the families of the two children, and especially between the two brothers who are their fathers. Well, maybe it was Benni or Bennie, but they all sound the same. And it surely can’t be a coincidence that one of the children, Benedetta, was known mostly by her nickname Benny.
Well-off kids from ‘good’ homes who have everything going for them but commit a horrible crime, and parents who find themselves confronted with a difficult decision: arrange a cover-up and partake of the crime themselves, or risk seeing their children’s lives ruined by one mistake.
There was the obvious thematic similarity, for a start. I’d forgotten all about that, however, and as I watched I kept being reminded of Michael Haneke’s film Benny’s Video (1992). Before seeing Ivano De Matteo’s I nostri ragazzi I’d read that it was based on the best-selling novel Het diner by Herman Koch (2009), which was inspired by actual events which had occurred in Barcelona in 2005 and had already been turned into a film by Menno Meyjes in 2013.
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