by BERTIE MANDELBLATT

In these days of Sopranos fever, One Hundred Steps introduces a breath of fresh air into pop culture’s happy world of neurotic Mafioso charmers.

This film tells the story of Peppino Impastato, a real-life anti-Mafia political activist murdered in his small Sicilian town of Cinisi in ’78. On a broader level, it reveals the ways the Mafia was culturally and socially integrated into public and private life, and how it operated virtually unchallenged in Sicily until Impastato’s death. The film succeeds beautifully at both portraying a frantically charismatic political hero and recounting the struggles of the left during the ’60s and ’70s in Italy.

Giuseppe “Peppino” Impastato (played by Luigi Lo Cascio) was born in ’48 into a middle-class family that owed its living to the local Mafia don who lived 100 steps down the street (hence the film’s title). Indeed, it is this familial and spatial proximity that provides a thematic coherence to the film, and lifts it above the standard biopic offering. When Peppino joined the Communist Party in the late ’60s, his father’s allegiance to the Mafia was immediately endangered. Quickly frustrated by the lack of interest the Party showed in local protests, Peppino quit and set up a local radio station, Radio Aut. (The scenes of his broadcasts from this station are among the best in the film.) Manic and poetic in turn, Peppino rants against the unchallenged dominion of the Mafia, the fearfulness of local citizens and the resultant complicity they must share in mob crimes. As he knew himself, however, his father’s own status as a Mafioso protected him from reprisals.

Shortly after his father’s death, while campaigning for local elections, Peppino himself was murdered in a hit staged to look like a botched attack on a railroad. He was posthumously elected to the town council after his passing triggered the first national anti-Mafia demonstration in Italy.

The epilogue to the film is surprisingly contemporary. In April of this year, the Mafia boss who ordered the hit was finally sentenced to life for Peppino’s murder.

And no, his name isn’t Uncle Junior. :

One Hundred Steps opens Friday, Oct. 11

>> Movie Listings