Snack Bar Budapest (1988)

out the remaining holdouts. The chief obstacle is the family running the Snack Bar Budapest, a stubborn little establishment that refuses to disappear merely because some teenage Caesar has drawn a new empire on a cocktail napkin. At first the lawyer lends Molecola his experience and cynical intelligence, treating eviction and intimidation as just another dirty job. But the deeper he enters the boy’s world, the more the planned redevelopment reveals itself as naked domination, with legal paperwork merely providing respectable trousers for brute force. When the people marked for removal stir memories of the man he once was, his buried conscience begins kicking against the deal, placing him between Molecola’s increasingly unhinged gang and a family with nowhere left to retreat. From there the film slides toward confrontation, betrayal and an armed siege without surrendering its final reckoning.

Tinto Brass shoots the whole business as a humid, feverish neo-noir rather than a conventional gangster yarn: blue smoke, red neon, silhouettes, billowing curtains, bare flesh and empty beachfronts turn the town into a sleazy dream that might evaporate by morning. The plotting can be ragged and the characters deliberately grotesque, but Giannini gives the film a bruised human centre. His quiet, exhausted performance makes the lawyer’s moral revival feel less heroic than painfully overdue. Beneath the nudity and black comedy, Brass is taking a sour look at eighties greed, authoritarian youth and an older generation too compromised to stop the monsters it helped create.

Although made in late-eighties Italy, the film seems to exist outside ordinary time, halfway between a 1940s gangster picture, a decadent music video and bargain-basement retro-futurism. It was filmed around Lido di Ostia on the Roman coast, including its seafront and the dunes of Castel Porziano, but Brass turns the area into an almost imaginary vice town. Zucchero’s synths, saxophone and bluesy score complete the mood: wet streets, cheap glamour, nicotine breath and trouble waiting beyond the next neon sign.

Raffaella Baracchi, a former Miss Italy, plays Milena with cool, statuesque beauty and a melancholy detachment that suits a woman caught between two shabby men. She is undeniably gorgeous, with the composed face and voluptuous figure of an eighties Italian pin-up, though the role gives her more presence than dialogue. This is restrained only by Brass standards: there is little sustained lovemaking, but plenty of breasts, bare bottoms, stockings, crotch-level framing and uninhibited full-frontal female nudity. The eroticism is often deliberately awkward or mixed with menace rather than romantic heat. Baracchi remains the principal attraction, but the film surrounds her with a small army of scantily dressed women, proving that even when Brass is making a bleak political noir, his camera can still locate a beautiful backside in the middle of a gunfight.