Two boys, a flat, dozens of unsuccessful job interviews and an enigmatic title: Santa Maradona. Were it not for a fairly good direction and an excellent co-protagonist (Libero de Rienzo), Marco Ponti’s first work would be nothing more than this: the story, not very original, of Andrea and Bart, two newly-graduated unwilling to take their own responsibilities, who daily delay their search for an employment. The movie mixes love stories, daily troubles and passions of our heroes (football, comics, closing credits, strange stories, books… thefts) in a non-homogeneous, not too serious way. The result is a funny but cobbled-together big comic, unable to mix two genres: on the one hand, the lively spirit of Libero de Rienzo’s gags and jokes, on the other the existentialist approach to Stefano Accorsi’s story, who is ideally in love with sincerity but actually unable to bear it. Although Accorsi’s performance is more natural than usual, Santa Maradona gains momentum only when De Rienzo is on the scene: he is the real protagonist of a movie which, trying to be interesting, forgets its true essence, that is to say the purely comic one, and gives way just to boring, trifling love stories. Like the cast, the film is as vague as its title: a strange grammatical mistake, a Manu Chao’s verse, and none of the two things. Just like Santa Maradona, which is not a comedy nor a love movie, but just something (unfortunately) stuck in the middle.