Italian cinema - what little we've seen of it - has seemed staid and uneventful for the last few decades. But often in national cinemas it takes real outsiders to shake things up, and as with Almodovar in Spain, so in Italy with the Sicilian cynicism of Daniele Cipri and Franco Maresco. Exactly what this duo mean by cynicism is hard to gauge, but their retrospective at the Lux is entitled The Cynical Feeling for Life, and feeling for life - in its craziest, ugliest, most anarchic forms - is there in plenty.
Cipri and Maresco - as indivisible a directing double act as the Coens or the Tavianis - started out making videos and experimental shorts for a Palermo TV station, and some early work is collected in this season as two packages of "Cinico TV". But their features are surely the weirdest to emerge from European cinema in years.
In The Uncle from Brooklyn (1995), a family of middle-aged brothers is entrusted by two dwarf Mafia dons with the care of a mysterious, cadaverous visitor. In between moments of farting and belching, and extended poker-faced sight gags, there are long stretches of silence and bleak Antonioni-like views of Palermo architecture, before the city is overrun by dogs and the whole cast is carried off to heaven.
Totu Who Lived Twice (1998) is a portmanteau of three tall stories, culminating in the tale of the two Totus, one a vengeful mafioso, the other a cantankerous God figure. Totu was the cause of much scandal in Sicily, not surprisingly - it features copious masturbation and scatology, and a scene in which a grinning idiot enthusiastically rogers a statue of the Virgin Mary. Throughout, grisly old men perform bizarre drag acts. The effect is neither camp nor queer, but almost medievally grotesque.
Unsettlingly, Cipri and Maresco's taste for the grue some has as its flip side a very polished aestheticism. While their cast and their bodily habits outdo Fellini, Luca Bigazzi's classically stark photography harks back to the severity of Pasolini. But even the beauty seems part of a self-conscious, Monty Python-ish wind-up. Perhaps you have to know Palermo culture to get what Cipri and Maresco are really up to, but the dialogue has its own bilious verve, even for those of us whose Sicilian dialect is a bit rusty.
I can't wait to see what these Sicilian cynics do next, although I suspect that they won't be nearly cynical enough to play the conventional art-house game.
• Ends Sunday. Box office: 020-7684 0201.
