“Innocent Goodbye” by Theresa Picciallo

“Innocent Goodbye” is a film that leaves us amazed. The technical quality is very high and it is rare to find shorts shot with this skill. After all, however, what strikes and captures us is the power of the story told. First of all, it is a duty to define a genre film “Innocent Goodbye”. The skill with which Theresa Picciallo, the director, builds tension is a completely cinematographic ability. Picciallo demonstrates great control and a great sense of rhythm because the film manages to keep viewers in suspense, for its entire duration. The tension ends up exploding in the finale, which overthrows victim and executioner in an upsetting game of fate. It takes so little to confuse the victim and the executioner, especially if they are two high school students, just seventeen years old. It is here that the purely narrative value of the film overlaps the social value. And this strong urgency is expressed, shouted, also through the entertainment dimension. Because building a moment of terror is the most effective way to hit the viewer. Thus is created that miracle, characteristic of cinema, whereby through illusion men are able to understand reality more deeply. The words after the finale, which trace tragic statistics on the massacres in American schools, come like an epitaph, a guillotine on the excitement of the film. Picciallo successfully manages to keep himself in balance between entertainment and social criticism, offering us a film that is a crystalline testimony of modern times.

The acting of the two protagonists, always impeccable during the course of the film, reaches its peak during the final confrontation. Here the two boys “steal” the scene from any other element and the two protagonists take the story to a higher level, of atrocious realism. We can’t wait to see another Theresa Picciallo movie.