Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be

here is an unprecedented element in the new Franco Maresco film, (): the female element. For the first time in the 30-year career of the Sicilian director (with or without his former accomplice and cinematographer, Daniele Cipri), a woman takes a central place in front of the camera. Not to be mistaken for a politically correct concession to pink quotas (misanthropists like Maresco after all, one suspects, hate men and women equally), the presence of Letizia Battaglia, a feisty 83-year-old photographer who made her name by immortalizing the Mafia wars of the ’70s, acts as a counterbalance to Maresco’s deteriorating cynicism—not that the reality in front of his camera offers any antidote to the quiet desperation that lurks beneath the