Gasoline Movie Review:


There's a fantastic dark and desperate tone to this Italian thriller--heavy shades of lovers-on-the-run B-movies. It opens with a tense sequence in which a glamorous woman (Valentini) arrives at an airport then tracks down her daughter Lenni (Orioli) where she works at a service station with her girlfriend Stella (Sansa). Understanding turns to worry then anger and violence, and the mother accidentally ends up dead in a puddle of blood.

The rest of the film centres on Stella and Lenni trying to dispose of the body and dodge the attentions of a trio of joyriders (Conti, Quaglia and Ragusa) who are at first just playing but grow increasingly vengeful.

Director-cowriter Stambrini gives the film an urgent biker-chick vibe as these increasingly distressed woman struggle to hold onto their love for each other amid the chaos and panic. Orioli makes Lenni slightly simple and very nervous, while Sansa's Stella is a more tough-skinned hothead ... until her beloved dog is threatened.

Even so, the film isn't completely successful; most set pieces are over familiar, and while the film plays heavily with Hitchcockian ideas (a pesky dead body), it never generates the black humour that Hitchcock used to so memorably get under our skin. On the other hand, there is bleak irony in the disembodied advice Lenni's mother continues to offer from the beyond, as well as the fact that they end up giving a lift to a chatty priest (Burruano).

And the bumbling youths on the girls' trail have no idea what they're really playing with here. Stambrini is definitely a filmmaker to watch.

Rich Cline

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