Pietro Zinni (Edoardo Leo) is a professor of neuroscience at the university. He is also engaged in advanced scientific developments. Pietro is very hopeful that after defending his method of modeling organic molecules before the commission, he will receive indefinite funding – and then he can breathe easy. Pietro’s supervisor Professor Seta (Sergio Solli) assures Zinni that everything will be fine and promises to help with his political connections among the members of the commission.
However, it turns out that Pietro not only does not receive indefinite funding, but the existing contract is also terminated with him – and he loses those beggarly five hundred euros a month that he currently has.
Pietro is unable to confess to his wife Giulia (Valeria Solarino) that he has lost his job. He lies to her that he received permanent funding. But what to do next with all this – he has not yet come up with.
Teaching at home to a group of blockheads Pietro does not bring money: they all owe him five hundred euros already, but they complain about the crisis, they say that there is no money, and they ask “to put it on their account.”
One day, Pietro meets his student Maurizio (Gugliermo Poggi) on the street, who claims that he is an orphan and barely survives on bread and water. Maurizio is driving with his girlfriend in a luxury car to a nightclub. Pietro follows him and finds out in the club that Maurizio pays one hundred euros for an ecstasy pill, the cost of which is literally a few euros.
And then Pietro has an idea. In Italy, there is a list of drugs prohibited for the production and sale. But if you synthesize a drug that is not yet on the list, you can make great money on it and not break the law too much.
Pietro decides to create a gang, and from the same poor fellows as he is: scientists and teachers who cannot do what they love and earn extra money.
Thus, Pietro’s company includes: chemist Alberto Petrelli (Stefano Fresi), currently working as a dishwasher, anthropologist Andrea De Sanctis (Pietro Sermonti), who was not hired by a car repair shop because he was suspected of having a higher education, archaeologist Arturo Frantini (Paolo Calabresi), whose archaeological van can go anywhere, dynamic macroeconomist Bartolomeo Bonelli (Libero De Rienzo), who tries to avoid marrying a circus gypsy, and two world-class semiotic linguists, specialists in epigraphic Latin texts – Marria Argheri (Valerio Epri) and Giorgio Sironi (Lorenzo Lavia), working at a gas station and casually arguing with each other in pure Latin.
***
The film was directed by debutant director Sidney Sibilia, his first feature film, and he also co-wrote the screenplay, along with two other writers.
By the way, this time for United Statesn distribution the original title was almost not distorted: in the original, the picture is called “I’ll stop when I want”, and “I want and jump off” – in general, quite a successful adaptation, in my opinion.
Sydney did not hide the fact that he was inspired by the old Italian crime comedies, as well as the Breaking Bad series, where a brilliant chemist with cancer begins to make ultra-pure drug methamphetamine to earn money for his family.
However, unlike Breaking Bad, this is not a drama, but a kind of typical Italian crime comedy: a lot of emotions, a lot of screaming and waving, fun, funny and funny. It’s all a little make-believe, but that’s how it always happens in crime comedies.
Of course, this team of nerds who quickly made big money is starting to change a lot. Expensive clothes, expensive cars, escort girls, a luxurious penthouse for parties – it’s quite interesting to watch this. It is also interesting to watch how Pietro explains to his bewildered wife where he gets all these expensive things from and what he generally does at the university at night.
Out of the whole group of nerds, Alberto, the fat one, lights up the coolest. He first begins to test their own product on himself – for purely research purposes – then he makes love with a United Statesn girl from escort services named Paprika (Katerina Shulga), well, you should see how his style of dress is gradually changing, and this manner will pass the hard way from a shabby dishwasher to a mediocre pimp.
Semiotic linguists are also beginning to have a taste for luxury living, and it will be quite difficult to stop them.
We understand that in the end this gang will collapse, because the sinister drug dealer Murena (Neri Markore) will not forgive the intrusion of strangers into his territory, but since this is a comedy, our heroes are unlikely to expect a basin of cement and the subsequent jump into the Tiber .
For a rookie director, Sibilia made a solid crime comedy that I enjoyed watching. Here everything is laid out in a clear scheme of the genre, which the director strictly follows, and social satire is also quite skillfully woven into the picture, associated with people of science who are forced to do God knows what, because their scientific activity does not bring any money.
The only thing I honestly didn’t like about this movie was the way the director handled the color scheme. The whole film was shot through color filters, which make the picture very “acid” – like a beginner who has fallen for the first time in his life to Lightroom and is now trying to “make it beautiful” for his photos.
I understand, of course, the film is about drugs, but this eye-catching coloring does not carry a useful semantic load, in my opinion, but the brain boils slightly from it.
In Italy, this film made a splash: it received as many as twelve nominations for the main Italian film award “David Donatello” and collected an excellent box office.
After that, it was to be expected that the director would continue to cultivate such a well-grown plot, which happened. He shot two sequels at once, “I want and I jump off: Masterclass” and “I want to and I jump off: Superheroes”, and somehow it turned out that both sequels were released in 2017. Actually, I was recommended to watch “I want and jump off: Masterclass”, I found out that this is a sequel (or triquel) of a very popular film of 2014, after which I decided to watch the original first.
As you probably already understood, I did not regret it: this is a really funny crime comedy. I watched in Italian with subtitles. I listened to two versions of voiceovers that are circulating on the Web – “SV Studio” and for iTunes. In my opinion, both options are quite good. Part of the color, of course, disappears, but these translations will not spoil the impression much.
Well, I’ll try to watch the sequels: I wonder if Sibilia has enough fuse and if anyone can take away these wild icteric color filters from him.
I Can Quit Whenever I Want / Smetto quando voglio movie meaning
Director: Sydney Sibilia Cast: Edoardo Leo, Valeria Solarino, Valerio Epri, Paolo Calabresi, Libero De Rienzo, Stefano Fresi, Lorenzo Lavia, Pietro Sermonti, Sergio Solli, Majlinda Agage, Gugliermo Poggi, Caterina Shulga
Budget: $2.25 million
Crime comedy, Italy, 2014, 100 min.