What do solitary hitmen want? To get out. Or a normal family life. Or for the senseless killing to stop. Salvo gives us versions of all these possibilities, with masses of style and a cool, thrilling central performance by Saleh Bakri as the titular Salvo – it means “safe” in Italian, a name that can be read ironically, depending on which end of the gun you are at.
Cannes liked it, and awarded it the grand prize in Critics Week in 2013, which is the one they hand out to new talent. Which situates Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza alongside Bernardo Bertolucci, Leos Carax, Wong Kar-wai, Julia Ducournau and Andrea Arnold.
For its money Cannes got a “hitman chokes” plot – John Woo’s The Killer is probably the closest analogue – with Salvo turning up at a job to waste everyone and discovering that one of his victims is blind (and pretty!). His inner compassionate human has been awakened. And so instead of killing her Salvo takes Rita (Sara Serraiocco) along with him. Will he get away with it? Will he fall in love with her? Precedent says no and yes, but then precedent is partly what Grassadonia and Piazza are playing with.
Borrowing a touch from Melville’s Le Samouraï, the action starts off with Salvo in bed, then follows him from wake-up to clean-up, entirely wordlessly, as he heads into a working day of killing people mercilessly. Rita is included along with the last job of the day and up till this point we’ve been watching Salvo at work as if this were a first-person shoot-em-up game.
Half an hour of silent but deadly stealth killing – no glimpse of the face of this man – eventually yields to part two, when Salvo, who’s been shot somewhere along the line, is doing his post-exertion warm-downs, still functioning like a professional, though now with a woman by his side who can only vaguely discern shapes and blurs. When he reports back to his boss, a paranoid, softly spoken sleaze in white leisurewear, Salvo lies and tells him Rita is dead.
Bakri is the right man for the job. Old enough to be plausible as a seasoned pro, young enough to be lithe and lean, the Palestinian actor invests Salvo with an impassivity that’s borrowed from Alain Delon, but he gives it his own spin.
The looks of the film are sleek too – dark locations, chiaroscuro lighting, a noirish vibe shot through with a gash of colour here and there. It’s the loneliness of the long distance hitman as a visual style.
Saleh does not say a word for the first 40 minutes, and then it’s “Avanti” – let’s go! – but by this point we have started learning something of the hitman’s home life, in a shitty dwelling house behind a dry cleaner’s, where his landlords, the too-attentive husband and dismissive wife scuttle about him, emphasising that this is a man who must not be messed with. Do they know what he does for a living? This is not a film full of explanation.
Against this wall of silence – a metaphor for blindness? – Serraiocco somehow makes her mark as the vulnerable poppet who is used to being treated casually and has ways of fighting back. Since Salvo is a hitman who’s decided not to kill her, Rita has worked out that she has cards to play. A battle of wills is the result, a hitman and victim meet-cute, the emotional cripple and the wary but not uninterested blind woman nobody wants (entirely implausible when you’ve taken a look at Serraiocco). Against the austerity of the hitman genre, Grassadonia and Piazza cut in some surging Italian romance. Cute.
The Ipress File is in here, in Salvo’s crappy lifestyle. And Sergio Leone eventually arrives for a shootout finale out of the spaghetti westerns. Woo, Wong and Melville too. Grassadonia and Piazza have seen all the films and roll out all the cliches, using them as a way of compressing the storytelling. If, eventually, the paucity of dialogue becomes a stylistic tic too far, the entertainment has otherwise been lavish. And the writing/directing duo exit this familiar yet freshly engaging story with a lovely, heartwarming scene that stands in acute and ironic contrast to everything that’s gone before. That’s the way to do it.
Salvo – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
