“What will we do if Daddy dies,” a girl asks her mother Lucia (Eleonora Giorgi) right before bedtime. Lucia has the same anxiety about her husband Nino Peralta (Giuliano Gemma), a thief turned cafe owner. And even as he quits crime, his son Paolo follows in his footsteps, committing the petty crimes that he’s avoiding. Nino also has to let Lucia leave him as he takes care of old business and to tie up some irritating loose ends. Those loose ends come in the form of Sebastiano Collecchia (Tano Cimarosa), an old friend and pickpocket. Collecchia tips him off because Antonio Plantamonte (Michele Placido), a hitman, is in Palermo looking for him.

Damiano Damiani’s film revolves around Nino and the different ways he handles these relationships. He assures Lucia’s anxieties and calms Collecchia down, but Plantamonte is different than those two. They just met, and instead of killing Nino, Plantamonte doesn’t but tries different strategies with him. At first, Plantamonte starts being coy, but he eventually tells Nino that he’s on the bottom of a hit list. A Man on His Knees doesn’t posit these two as weaklings but they’re not the kind of fake bravado filled men either. It then becomes a unique depiction of masculinity breaking down because of bigger, evil men around them.

A Man on His Knees has Plantamonte being the thorn in Nino’s side but that eventually changes. As I wrote above, the film shows them less as each other’s antagonists as much as each other’s equals. The film, then, makes room for a real villain, a mob boss or three controlling Nino’s business. What viewers see is a character study, evolving as Nino starts to wake up to the world around him. There are tropes in here, like the antihero becoming a detective because no one’s stepping up. And Damiani depicts all of this with a deft hand, with traces of whimsy to lighten the mood.

A Man on His Knees shows the precarity of working class life, especially within circles in Palermo. Circumstances change within the Peralta family so they go from one beat up apartment to another. Even Paolo notices these changes, and without saying anything, his worries about Nino turn into something else. And even without the Paolo subplot, the Peralta’s apartment, both of them, stop being safe havens. In looking at the big picture, one must be careful not to write about how this film depicts Palermo, whether positive or negative. It’s still beautiful without being monumental, it shows functioning infrastructure even if it leaves Nino behind.

Stream A Man on His Knees on OVID.