Grazie Zia

For his first feature, a black comedy modelled on Bellocchio's Fists in the Pocket, Samperi even borrowed Lou Castel to embody his anti-hero, the son of a business tycoon, who initially expresses his rebellion by pretending to be unable to walk, and snarling insults at all and sundry from his wheelchair. Sent to recuperate in the care of an aunt (Gastoni) - a doctor but also a beautiful woman - he snares her into a kind of sexual complicity, forcing her to humour him in a series of bizarre rites which rise in crescendo to his final invention, a game of euthanasia. Uneven, more black than comic, but capturing much the same sense of rapt perversity as Bellocchio's film: an undeniably striking debut.