L'uomo di vetro (2007)

It is the beginning of the 1970s. Leonardo, known as Leuccio Vitale, is a young man from Palermo who belongs to a powerful Mafia clan led by his uncle, Giovanbattista Vitale, who initiated him into murder when he was barely a teenager. Bold and determined, the young man commits robberies and murders, but on the other side of the law he leads an entirely ordinary life: he lives with his mother and sister, has a beautiful girlfriend and a sports car, a Lancia Fulvia. It is precisely because he reluctantly lends the car to some friends to carry out a kidnapping that Leuccio is identified and imprisoned. In prison, the young man is tormented by remorse, which soon takes a toll on his nervous system: he begins to suffer violent convulsions, commits acts of self-harm, and is plagued by mystical visions that denounce him as “guilty” and “impure.” Things do not improve after his release: despite the evidence that he had nothing to do with the crimes, Leuccio shuts himself away at home, and neither his uncle’s nor his female relatives’ reassurances are any use. In a moment of apparent “recovery,” after meeting his girlfriend, he decides to spill everything. He goes to the police station and into the office of Deputy Commissioner Bruno Contrada, and begins to reveal everything he knows: the Mafia bosses’ chain of command, responsibility for the murders, ties between Mafiosi and politicians, prominent names, and so on. But because of the chilling clarity of the facts—and especially because of his semi-altered state—Leuccio is not believed. Instead, he is branded “mad” and locked up in a psychiatric hospital, where he will live through (brief) periods of lucidity, during which he cooperates with the justice system (which, during interrogations, merely has him repeat the same story over and over), and increasingly violent episodes. He eventually burns everything in his cell and cuts open his abdomen. Meanwhile, because of his statements, his cousin and uncle are murdered. A closing caption, over a photograph of the real Leonardo Vitale, states that in 1984, after being discharged from the hospital, Leuccio will be murdered as he leaves a church.