PROGETTO IN SVILUPPO
A SCREENPLAY WRITTEN AND ADAPTED FOR ITALY
BY THE SAME AUTHOR OF THE THEATRICAL PIÈCE.
DAVID MAMET: OSCAR NOMINEE
AND PULITZER PRIZE WINNER.
A FILM BY LUCA BARBARESCHI,
THE GREATEST ITALIAN INTERPRETER OF MAMET’S TEXTS.
Charles is a psychiatrist who gets thrown into a media and judicial wringer when he refuses to testify in court in favour of a young patient accused of killing the people. The newspapers report the event of this doctor’s refusal and smear it over the front pages of the newspapers, heavily accusing him of homophobia. The homicidal patient claims to be part of the LGBT community and, according to him, this is the reason why his psychiatrist will not testify in court or to the police. The young guy speaks about Charle’s religious conversion, a metamorphosis that is so radical, it steers him towards a clear prejudice against the gay community. The basis of these accusations is false and stems from a misunderstanding that gravitates around a scientific article written by Charles. “Homosexuality as an adaptation” was the theme treated by the psychiatrist but the published version was titled, “Homosexuality as a deviation”. Thus, what apparently starts as a digression of the newspaper’s headline becomes the detonator of an incendiary fuse that will destroy Charle’s life: work, affections, friendshops, respectability. His wife Kath, the lawyer Richard and a magistrate begin a wide-ranging battle in an attempt to defend the morality intact and irreproachable psychiatrist. However, each one, for their own reasons, eventually strongly encourages him to give in to the pressures of the people, the audience, the reader; in short, those who endlessly want and seek a scapegoat to put under the spotlight. This is when Charles realizes that he has become the subject of the momentary disapproval of a fickle society, always in search of a new culprit to blame the vigilante justice of the community on. “There is the laws and there is my law,” are the words of the “Penitent” who, following the statement pronounced by his wife, “You, you’re so good, yet you killed us all, finds himself faced with an epilogue made of interrogations, demolitions, betrayals and, finally, truth.”
