52 Films by Women Vol 2. 15. LE ULTIME COSE (Pawn Streets) (Director: Irene Dionisio)

 

We see them through a window, the anxious crowd, middle-aged or older, waiting, anxiety mixed with apprehension. A key is turned, locks unsecured and they file in, in singles, or, as we see later with their young children. They are pawning their luxury goods, coats, jewellery, passing them to be appraised and then an offer made – the loan. The owners leave with their ticket – the item’s buy-back value – but every item is undervalued, feeding a secondary market in single older men who buy the tickets. Pawnees – the name in common with a diminishing Native American tribe – have to return within an agreed time to repay the loan and interest and retrieve said item, or else it is sold at auction. Loan arrangements are renegotiated, stretched by Pawnees desperate to retrieve items pawned on the sly, heirlooms hocked out of the sight of spouses (‘she doesn’t know I pawned it’), fearing the confrontation that will result once the item is missed. ‘You pawned the clock my mother gave us, why not the painting given by your mother?’ ‘It is of my mother.’ ‘Exactly – even she did not want it.’

Welcome to Turin. Welcome to austerity à l’italia. Welcome to the world of Le Ultime Cose (Pawn Things) the debut fiction feature film by Italian writer-director Irene Dionisio.

We’ve seen pawn shops in movies before, notably in director Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964) starring Rod Steiger as a Holocaust survivor who runs a pawn shop in East Harlem. The story was not about those who are forced to part with their items – the sympathetic poor finding themselves in hard times – but on the appraiser, an individual wrestling with their conscience in the face of needfulness. Dionisio doesn’t focus on one character for dramatic moral impact but three: a young appraiser, Stefano (Fabrizio Falco) who is learning his craft under the tutelage of hardened Sergio (Roberto de Francesco); Michele (Alfonso Santagata), a grandfather who takes a job working for a loan note buyer to pay for his grandson’s hearing aid; and Sandra (Christina Rosamilia) a transsexual who has pawned her luxury fur coat, minus one button, unable to connect, even when offered help.

Michele is the most interesting character because he is drawn into a world – the secondary loans business, although that does not quite sum it up – that, if not exactly corrupts him, soils him, puts him in danger, makes him feel that at any point the police could come for him.

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Originally published in full on Bitlanders.com