Human capital is an economic term used to describe how useful a particular individual is in the production process. A person’s knowledge, education, skills, health, age and similar parameters are calculated mathematically to determine exactly how much someone is worth, and the model in which human capital was used as a key factor won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2018 to the American Paul Romero. The same term was dealt with in the drama chosen as the best Italian film in 2013 by Paolo Virzi, who shot a striking drama based on the motifs of the American Stephen Amidon’s novel of the same name. Perhaps “Il capitale umano” could best be described as the Italian “Whirlpool of Life”, a drama in which we follow the story from the perspective of several main characters.
The whole story revolves around one key event that we see right at the start of the film. After a Christmas party for the Milanese elite, a waiter returns home by bicycle. Someone will hit the unfortunate man with a car and leave him seriously injured in the canal, and this incident will further connect the destinies of the two families. Admittedly, the destinies of the Ossola and Bernaschi families are already connected because their children are in a relationship, and in the first part of the film we follow the story from the perspective of Dino Ossola (Fabrizio Bentivoglio). He is a somewhat desperate builder who risked all his assets and took on additional debt to invest 700 thousand euros in a high-risk hedge fund. The story obviously takes place on the eve of the big crisis that is 2008/09. crashed the world economy and the real estate market, and everything Dino has will invest in a fund run by Giovanni Bernaschi (Fabrizio Grifuni).
He, on the other hand, is a shamelessly rich financier who lives in a villa near Milan, and he and Dino are connected because his son Massimiliano is a high school graduate in a relationship with Dino’s daughter Serena, who goes to the same elite private school. It’s obvious that Giovanni doesn’t really want to have much to do with Dino and only thanks to the relationship of their children will he allow him to invest in a fund that should bring a huge return, but he doesn’t want to have much to do with the tiny scratcher who irresistibly resembles Lemmon’s character in ” Glengarry Glen Ross”. Giovanni’s wife Carla (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) is a typical high society lady whose main interest is squandering her husband’s wealth, and now she has decided to invest money in the local theater.
The story will be well rounded and built on, there are a few more important side characters, and almost nothing will be as it seems at the beginning. By the end, we will find out what happened to the unfortunate cyclist, as well as that human lives really have different values, and almost every character here knows a secret that could significantly direct someone else’s life. As soon as we have characters like these rich people, it is clear that the theme of greed is also on the wallpaper, and in the end the most interesting character of all was Mrs. Carla, a woman who once decided to sacrifice all her ambitions, dreams and passion for the sake of comfort, but now it seems that she is starting to understand that it might not have been the best choice. “Human Capital” was a smart, finely structured film in which the mosaic fits together like a puzzle and through each story we get some pieces of the puzzle, a drama that brought Virzi and Bruna Tedeschi nominations for European director and actress of the year.