ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2017  - Part 2.

 Opening night at the Italian Film Festival you scored Francesco Amato's Lasciati andare/Let Yourself Go which, like too many film festival selections, must have been chosen because it wouldn't scare away paying customers. This opened for an extended run the week after.

It is a conventional comedy where it’s a surprise to find current face of the Italian serious film Tony Servillo doing Woody Allen. He plays a Jewish psychoanalyst who is too mean to pay for a divorce from the appealing wife still doing his laundry and living in the next flat in the ghetto block where Tony is infuriated by the Observant neighbour who leaves the top floor lift door open on Sundays to avoid breaking shabbat.

 The patients from Tony's practice keep on turning up in the film’s plot developments. They include Giacomo, of the great Aldo, Giacomo and Giovanni team, who dates the wife and is more in his element.

Tony’s told by his doctor to get into shape or he’ll get diabetes, listing the consequences, and that bringing his mum’s exercise bike up from the cellar won’t help. He won’t stick with that the way he would with a gym membership. That’s using psychology on the shrink.

In the gym, Tony collides with sex pot Verónica Echegui running her jazzercise class in her spandex pants and when she hides from the owner’s jealous wife in the steam room with Tony, she convinces him he needs her as a personal trainer - predictable jokes about him running and working out with her as he gradually gets into shape.

Her whacked out sex life intrudes, with her black son setting fires, including one on Tony’s jacket. 
She is working Tony as part of the scheme where her psycho prisoner boyfriend Luca Marinelli wants to be hypnotised into remembering where he put the jewel store robbery loot. We've forgotten about him pacing out and burying this at the start of the film. When Tony finally gets him on the couch the piece moves deeper into knockabout. The session puts pistol waving side kick Vincenzo Nemolato to sleep and recovering the loot involves dropping an owl cage on the hapless Slav's head.

The handling is brisk and the bright colour scheme attractive. Mixing Jewish jokes, shrink jokes and slapstick crook comedy is occasionally amusing but we’ve been there before and might have hoped they’d come up with a more substantial vehicle for Servillo.

Simone Godano figured the personality swap idea could stand another go round as her first movie Moglie e marito/Wife & Husband. I wasn’t so sure. To start with macho Pierfrancesco Favino (Suburra) and elegant Kasia Smutniak (Perfetti Sconosciuti) seem unlikely contenders for a gender swap but that’s the thing that drives the film. Inner Favino having to come to terms with kissing outer Favino with three days growth of beard is in the same dodgy area as Hal Roach’s old Turnabout  but they embrace the possibilities and the leads enjoying making out is one of the funniest parts of the film.

Moglie e marito - Smutniak e Favino 

He’s a scientist trying to produce a machine which will transfer memories from one individual to another and she’s a sleek wannabe TV personality. Their marriage is on the rocks when his experiment swaps them over. There is the now familiar uneasy comedy of her acting butch and him fluttery but they do manage to get laughs out of inner Favino sitting with legs apart revealing his panties on her TV show and moving into startled Valerio Aprea’s flat while Kasia is outraged that he is putting junk food into her trim body and letting the baby breast feed after she had weaned it.

Best glossy European production values put the characters into plausible home, laboratory and TV industry settings. The piece gains a bit more traction when the pair have to use their old skill sets to sort out the problems they have caused but the ending when both have to articulate what they’ll miss if the transfer is reversed is actually quite touching.

Amori che non sanno stare al mondo/Stories of Love That Cannot Belong to This World is intensely female, like writer-director Francesca Comencini’s 2009 Lo Spazio bianco, so much so that a bloke viewer is likely to feel uncomfortably like an eavesdropper.

We kick off with thirties-ish Lucia Mascino waking up and immediately sending of needy texts to her ex-lover, who says he’d rather be put to the rack that resume their association. After chatting with her female neighbours, each with their own relationship dramas, needing a fifty Euro recharge for her smart ‘phone is a major crisis.

The film stays with the intensely irritating Mascino, pulling of the considerable feat of enlisting the audience to her point of view.

We see her as a disruptive speaker on a panel with white fleck bearded Professor Thomas Trabacchi. Her interruptions get her into his bed for a protracted relationship where they move in together. After make outs and inexplicable Black & white inserts, they reach the point where she wants to discuss feelings and he wants to rest up for the paper he has to complete the next day.  His lack of commitment (“I will not be prisoner of a dream I don’t share”) triggers their break up “Take a suitcase. It’s humiliating to be left by a man with a back pack.”

The separation is rough on Mascino despite the comforting of her friends and meetings in the university wash room where women compare experiences. However, Mascino finds consolation in an encounter with a glamorous pole dancer which comes with some striking naked lesbian love making.

Trabacchi meanwhile has paired with an appealing girl student who makes it clear she wants a ring on her finger. Trabacchi pictures Mascino criticing his conduct. News of the marriage gets back to Mascino who faints but rallies.

The former lovers later have a brief meeting and discuss the direction of their lives. We are given the impression that Mascino has the firmer grip on coming realities.

Some academic background, discussions of female orgasm and lots of skin pore close close-ups in wide screen are part of the film’s intense scrutiny. This one takes a lot of concentration. It’s not for everyone but I would imagine it will enthuse an audience that will identify with its female protagonist.

Daniele Vicari’s Sole, cuore, amore and Sergio Castellito’s Fortunata - a couple of  grim accounts of struggling working class mothers weren’t equal to their ambitions, though surprisingly Leonardi di Constanza’s L’intrusa without name stars and technicians covered the same area remarkably well. 

Fortunata : Trinka  

Director Sergio Castellitto was determined to jam everything into Fortunata - mother love, abusive husband, police brutality, kids’ birthday parties, Chairman Mao, drug use, burka women, racial slurs, loan sharks, a raunchy make out, a Chinese women’s synchronised tai chi routine in the rain and of course, being an Italian film, ‘vergogna’.

                                      

Castellito is an actor and his first loyalty is to his players who get to give bravura performances. Bleach-blonded Jasmine Trinca does the whole Anna Magnani thing as the beautician mother of young Nicole Centanni trying to keep custody despite the rough handling she gets from cop husband Edoardo Pesce. She also has to work it out with immigrant lover Tattooist Alessandro Borghi, who is helping build the salon where she can do heads without having to trundle all over the city.

Borghi’s life is further complicated by his dotty mother who no longer recognises him, a nice raddled turn by Hanna Schygulla. Her  presence prompts several nice visual touches. Borghi has the image of her, young and glamorous, inked on his shoulder and her floating umbrella is good movie short hand.  Some hope emerges when the child psychologist Centanni is referred to for spitting turns out to be simpatico Stefano Accorsi. His job is driving him spare. Accorsi's description of tracking down his deadbeat dad in Africa is one of the film’s highlights.

The film is effectively located in the urban fringe. Trinca trying to find a ‘phone booking on the outlying high rise intercom on the wrong side of the ring road gets asked if she gives massages.  The hairdressing salon with the blue neon sign reading “Lucky” is working it too hard however.

The film is a glum soaper not really lifted by its ambitions and strong cast. Castellitto’s best contribution to the Italian Film Festival has been showing up dubbed up in that nice Lavazza commercial. “In life there is always more to taste.”

Vicari’s 2012 Diaz - Don’t Clean Up This Blood! (title in English) is so imposing that I homed in on his new Sole, cuore, amore / Sun, Heart, Love with some enthusiasm. While it has strong characterisations, convincing locations in the Ostia region and the significant subject of the working poor, I came away disappointed.

The film is unrelievedly grim and it is undermined by the rather precious device of cross cutting Isabella Ragonese’s hard lot with the dance performances of her downstairs neighbour Eva Grieco, with their brass instrument accompaniment blaring on the track of both.

Ragonese is a mother of four who finds herself working as a waitress two hours away from her home, getting up at four thirty in the morning, catching an unreliable bus and train with the striking shot of the passengers finishing their trip on foot at dawn to make the point. She finds herself being docked by boss Marzio Romano Falcione for late arrivals. One of the film’s strengths is that both she and the film see his point of view, having hired her on the basis that she would work his seven day week and having to placate his dissatisfied ex cashier wife and expect the same standard of competence from his Arab student counter hand.  Husband Francesco Montanari looks after the kids and provides a spiff to smoke on the balcony of their sea on both sides flat but Ragonese is too exhausted to get involved in sex.

Sole, cuore, amore - Ragonese.

The pressure on Ragonese mounts plausibly but not all that involvingly, piling grief upon grief. Comes the finale and she’s been told to get medical treatment but finds herself sitting on the subway bench as her trains pull out. Throw in a lesbian shower scene and a little girl singing "Sole, cuore, amore" in the cafe.

On the other hand mature director Leonardo di Costanzo's L'intrusa/The Intruder is an agreeable surprise. It comes with a load of social indignation and is the kind of project subsidy hungry film makers turned out with infrequent success in the eighties.

 Di Costanzo had a career in documentaries, did an episode in a portmanteau film to which Jean Luc Goddard also contributed and has made one other dramatic feature. His script is co-authored with Bruno Oliviero, the director of Silvio Orlandi's 2012 La variabile umana. The approach here is to dispense with sculptured lighting and star performances in a subject that might have made a main stream dramatic feature.

Valentina Vannino, the wife of an arrested Camorra crime syndicate murder suspect, is given shelter in the hut on the scruffy suburban waste land that severe looking organiser Raffaella Giordano uses for a kids playground. She is setting up a Festa, one of the few activities which brighten the drab Neapolitan working class area. Music, a papier maché lizard and a ride on mechanical man made out of bike parts are in preparation.

The parents and school authorities object to Vannino who they associate with a brutal killing that has left one of the children mute after seeing her father beaten to death in front of her. Giordano protests that her project is "per tutti bambini" but there is an incident in which Vannino responds in character and the whole project is jeopardised.

Full of telling realistic detail - the bike repair shop guy who understands how to involve the withdrawn child, the visits of the Camorra wives, Vannino's second thoughts about make-up, the severed human hand that the kids spit at. The Festa makes a nice (ironic) climax. What might have been big dramatic scenes - finding the intruder in the locked kitchen, the meeting between the two little girls or the final understanding of the consequences are not shown. Instead we get loosely framed shots and subdued colour, not unlike news coverage. Mixing between source music and the play-out is about as interventionist as di Costanzo will go.  The staging with families overlooking the shared ground also sometimes resembles The Wire.

This one is well worth a viewing.

Giuseppe Piccioni penetrates the gumnut curtain more often than most Italian film makers and those movies have been consistently engaging - 1996’s Cuore al verde/Penniless Hearts, 2001’s Luce dei miei occhi/Light of My Eyes, 2004’s  La Vita che vorrei/The Life I Want  and 2009’s Giulia non esce la sera/Giulia Doesn't Date at Night.

His new Questi giorni / These Days is a departure from them. The only one of his regular performers to show is a now mature Margarita Buy who acquits herself impressively as a middle aged mother, becoming a hairdresser, her ambitions sacrificed to raise daughter Maria Roveran. She’s highly critical of her girl’s do.

The plot centers on four young women about to enter adult life. Roveran is diagnosed with a life threatening disease (excuse for one of the film’s boob shots). Orchestra violinist Caterina Le Caselle has become pregnant. Laura Adriani’s love life with Filippo Timi (La doppia ora) is stressful and dissatisfied Marta Gastini (also in Moglie e marito) has accepted a waitressing spot in Belgrade. The early stages of the film establishing the leads are uninvolving as the audience struggles to remember which back story goes with which unlined face.

However, when Gastini decides to drive to her new Serbian job, the others join her and the piece turns into an engaging Italian Road Trip movie. The girls with their pre-occupations and lack of experience become distinct characters. They encounter a group of English-speaking boys who take an interest, lending them a tent and taking them canoeing at the camp site. One tries to link up with Roveran - shot of him awkwardly sharing the back seat in the car. Gastini takes a dim view of that, sends him for coffee, dumps his back pack and drives off.

When they get to her drab looking Serbian destination they share the flat of her severe friend Mina Djukic, part of a group restoring a Belgrade cinema - which shows The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator over the dance floor. The backpacker is there and lets it be known that his experiences with the girls screwed up his vacation and he is looking elsewhere now - telling small scene.

Finally, a dash to the emergency room unites the friends in a way that makes the film rewarding. It has an uncharacteristic natural feel and reliance on close-ups of fresh featured young women which may (or may not) draw on improvisation

Effective desaturated scope images. The great Sergio Rubini (La bionda) is down to a walk-on.

 The political thriller is one of the best traditions in European film making - Cayatte’s Nous sommes tous des Assassins (France, 1952) Autant-Lara’s Tu ne tueras point (France, 1961), Costa Gavras’ Z (France, 1969), a whole swathe of the work of Gian-Maria Volonte, Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte  (Italy, 2003)  and Diaz, Don’t Clean Up This Blood.

For Annarita Zambrano to move into this company with her first feature Dopo la guerra/After the War (Italy, 2017) with a first time writer and featuring young Charlotte Cétaire in her debut role is a big ask and it’s impressive to see how far they get.

Dopo la guerra - Battison & Cétaire 

The opening is riveting, with a university professor leaving an angry 2002 student meeting, only to be gunned down. The assassin claims to be from The New Armed Faction for the Revolution, a long dormant Italian movement from the “Years of Lead” eighties political turmoil.

This impacts on Giuseppe Battison as one of the movement’s former leaders now sheltering in France under a Mitterand era amnesty. One of his fellow exiles has already been repatriated to face jail in his native Italy and Battison goes on the run, hiding out in a dilapidated Contis des Bains farm with his daughter Cétaire who was about to compete in her school sports contest and sit for her bac.

She sees her life destroyed, particularly when the striking Marilyne Canto arrives to do an interview, which will counter act a damning cover story in L’Express.  The journalist lets slip dad's plan to shift to Nicaragua.

Parallel with Battison’s flight, his sister, the still great looking Barbora Bobulova (impressive in Paolo Franchi’s La Spettatrice/The Spectator and Ferzan Ozpetek’s Cuore sacro/Sacred Heart) finds their association with a terrorist brother she hasn’t seen for twenty years jeopardises her position as a lecturer on the work of Dante, her husband’s election as chief magistrate and the safety of her mother Elisabetta Piccolomini through whose window a brick with the word “assassin” has been heaved. Bobulova discovers that her mother has been in secret contact, cherishing hidden photos of Cétaire.

The weight of the film falls on Battison whose character is given exceptional depth. He killed the judge who had condemned his associates in front of the man’s eight year old child only after he had seen his own brother shot down “sous mes yeux” by police after he had surrendered his weapon. He views the only outcome of his situation being the amnesty of his movement after their war - something the Italian government will never give. Battison has the telling story about meeting his former school mate while on the run and the man admiring his veins, having become a junkie, a casualty of a regime which would rather see his generation destroyed by dope than given responsibility.

Battison speaking French, (this is a French movie despite its Italian star, subject and place in an Italian Film Festival) is stretched to his limits. The amiable fat man comic of his earlier films did manage an effective serious part, dominating Paolo Genovese’s recent Perfetti sconosciuti/Perfect Strangers but this role would have challenged Volonte at his peak. The ending we are given fails to exploit the possibilities the film has established.

Zambrano’s handling is more at ease with film form, spacing the dialogue with effective locating footage - Bobulova in the street with graffiti like that of the opening, the glimpsed night time fair, Cétaire caressing the kittens in the barn or cycling through the striped shadows the line of trees throw on the road.

With its possibly inevitable shortcomings Doppo la guerra is still an imposing piece of work. It should be seen.

This makes a revealing comparison with Sidney Lumet’s dominant pre-occupation, the grown children of the second half Twentieth Century left. Think Daniel, Running on Empty or Garbo Talks or indeed Ricardo Darin in Kamchatka.

Fabio Grassadonia and  Antonio Piazza’s Sicilian Ghost Story is something new – a genuinely scary movie derived from the case history of a Mafia murder, filmed in an unfamiliar style that fluctuates between realism and fantasy. Romeo and Juliet get mixed in with Dante and a few more high culture references.  - sound like your total festival movie? Well it is but it overcomes that handicap.

We start with a scene of Sicilian school children on their way home with young Julia Jedlikowska following class mate Gaetano Fernandez off the path only to be attacked by a menacing dog whom he distracts with a half sandwich and his back pack. The two go off on the motor scooter he’s under the age to ride to see his steeplechase horse and they have their first kiss. In the background we spot a giant dam and a police car headed towards Fernandez’ house. The girl comes back after dark and Vincenzo Amato her father, while clearly angry, embraces her.

The boy vanishes from the classroom and everybody avoids the subject. There’s no sympathy in either house. The boy’s grand parents won’t talk to her and her mean Swiss mum spends her time in the house sauna and serving dad cold pasta meals from the fridge.

Turns out that Fernandez’ unseen father is a super grass and his former polizia associates have kidnapped his son to pressure him into silence. Both children lose their grip on reality under the pressure of his captivity and her efforts to find out where he’s being held. The film’s most striking innovation is a dream sequence that we assume is one character’s when it proves to be the other's.

Evidence of a decayed society is everywhere. The pet owl fed on the poisoned mice in the barn is one of the film’s nicest double duty bits of business. There are a couple of striking wide angle distorted tracking shots and it is all filmed in a disorienting style with cuts to objects too large in the frame, exaggerated sounds and confusing digressions. This contributes to the considerable suspense.

If the film has a fault, it is the clashing style of the sunny ending. Of the young players making their first film, friend Corinne Musallari sending coded messages by flashlight across the dark hillside village makes the most impression.

Feel good pieces don’t leave you feeling better than Gianluca Ansanelli's bright coloured scenics packed comedy Troppo Napoletano/From Naples With Love.

When his wedding singer dad is killed in a crowd surfing accident (they distracted the audience by announcing the prawn dish), troubled fat kid Gennaro Guazzo is assumed to have made a suicide attempt after school janitor finds him mounting the balcony.  Actually he was trying to get a better look at the girl classmate he has the hots for. Guazzo gets put into therapy with Dottore Luigi Esposito who explains that the kid’s entire extended family can’t attend the sessions. Mum, lush red head Serena Rossi, and an aunt clean his kitchen while he talks to the kid instead.

Troppo Napoletano - Rossi, Guazzo & Esposito

Bonding with Luigi over Papaya gelato, Guazzo tries to set the shrink up as a match for his widowed mother, sabotaging a succession of comic suitors. However, he finds that the object of his pubescent affections is the daughter of an ex-soap star whose drama class mum attends and who looks like pairing with her.

Determinedly Neapolitan, with Guazzo walking through the open air mercato with Rossi , taking the object of his affections on the tour of the church crypt and getting the animated history lesson about Greater Napoli. Lots of nice views of the Bay. The shot of the girl sitting alone on the beach is a great piece of movie punctuation.

Throw in a load of broad comedy and appealing characters, Guazzi’s fantasies (he pictures taking out a mortgage by plonking his piggy bank on the manager’s table), a couple of great musical numbers - Rossi doing her “La Spagnola” act that the neighbours crowd in to see - and the final Saturday Night Fever kids recital, and the fact that the film is a grotesque rendition of adolescence fades away.

Questione di Karma / It’s All About Karma looked a likely item coming from Edoardo Maria Falcone of 2015’s Se Dio Vuole/God Willing fame and featuring popular comic Fabio De Luigi (Il peggior settimana /Natale della mia vita and the Aspirante vedovo re-make) and Elio Germani an establish star (also in Ternderness) and it’s cast and presentation can’t be faulted. However all this production value is wrapped around a formulaic script played for predictable laughs.

We kick off with the heir to the coloured pencil factory idolising his dad who jumped out of the top storey window of their home. Grown to be bearded de Luigi who is on the point of having his inheritance taken away by his step father and sister Isabella Ragonese (transformed from Sole, cuore, amore). His Budhist studies send de Luigi off to meet reclusive author Phillipe Le Roy in his alpine retreat.  The sage is more interested in roast potatoes than enlightening our hero on re-incarnation.

Germano shows up as a conman who manages to convince de Luigi that he is his reborn father and in the usual feel good interaction the pair give each other’s lives a new impetus. It takes all the cast’s charm and the best technical finish to make this one go the distance. De Luigi’s transformation from earnest slacker to hard nosed business man is hard to take as a happy ending though the misleading climax of Germani’s plot is agreeable.

Massimiliano Bruno’s Ignorance is Bliss/Beata Ignoranza an attempt to recycle God Willing’s teaming of Marco Giallini and Alessandro Gassman, works out better, despite a change of direction half way through. We start off with teacher Giallini, who confiscates his kids' cell 'phones at the beginning of his lesson, discovering his old rival Gassman has been appointed to his school with a philosophy of ignoring paperwork because everything they need is on the Net. They nearly come to blows to the delight of their students whose video of the confrontation goes viral.

We've seen the menace of cell 'phones played out with Giallini before  in Perfetti sconosciuti.  Complications ensue when their shared daughter (yes, we remember Les Compères) arrives pregnant with her "quirky" film crew to have them filmed switching their approaches for her TV documentary. This element gets lost as we explore the leads' character shortcomings - particularly in their dealings with women. The appealing Valeria Bilello is particularly badly used.

  

There are a few attempts to open up the form, as with the early scenes of turning to the audience or Carolina Crescentini's answering back from the mortuary photo, but mainly the piece coasts on the opposition of the two leads backed by skilled players and brisk film making.

Silvio Soldini has been off our radar most of the time since his 2007 Giorni e nuvole / Days and Clouds and we’ve seen regrettably little of his star, the immensely appealing Valeria Golino  - Rain Man 1988, Giulia non esce la sera / Giulia Doesn't Date at Night 2009 among some remarkable items.

Questione di Karma : Germano & de Luigi at Trevi Fountain

Signora Golino is in top form in the new Il colore nascosto delle cose / Emma playing a blind osteopath crossing the path of  Adriano Giannini, who we know is going to be a soul-less user because we see him working in advertising. Sure enough he is making it with someone else’s wife who immediately unwraps and tells him there will be consequences if he answers his cell ‘phone, as well as fetching blonde Anna Ferzetti, a fiancée he has to keep stalling when he starts moving on Valeria after he sees her buying that bright red outfit. She has developed the ability to smell colours and a couple of other skills he and the audience find puzzling. 

Il colore nascosto delle cose :Giannini & Golino

Of course it all unravels, here in a surprise meeting with Ferzetti in a supermarket where the low life Giannini leaves Golino lost in shallow focus bright lights, passing her off as “A poor blind lady” he’s helping. There’s some by play with the family the low life  didn’t visit when his step father died in the provinces. Both Golino and Giannini get to fill in their characters with involving back stories. For most of the running time this has been a maybe but Soldini manages a final twist which tips the scales in it’s favour.

The film making is unremarkable. It has one curious feature. Now that digital has made it easy, the shape - well size here - of the image keeps on changing, not dictated by obvious thematic (I Am Not Madam Bovary) or aesthetic (Grand Budapest Hotel) choices.

And for the record, I encountered more soulless activity in feature film making than in advertising.

There’s something odd happening with Gabriele Muccino’s  L'estate addosso / Summertime. It’s two years old and the coverage seems to be in Italian which is odd for a film made largely in English. IMDB gives the American support players (Laura Cayouette memorable in Django Unchained and Scott Bakula!) top billing. The copy arrived here without sub-titles, making key passages frustrating, and Palace did not feel they should cut their premium prices for the showing.

Muccino at work with Lutz, Frey, Haro and Pacitto.

 

 

 

 

 

The film itself  is disturbingly uneven. Muccino’s been off making Will Smith movies in the ‘States and while Pursuit of Happyness and Seven Pounds are not disgraceful they don’t seem to have helped either man’s careers. Summertime opens with a downwards shot of Roman teenager Brando Pacitto (chiefly notable for playing Jesus on TV) stretched out on the grass possibly deliberately invoking Boyhood and his English language narration provides our old friend alienation. “Days with my friends were all the same.” He completes his finals but is involved in a traffic accent which leaves him battered but the recipient of a compensation cheque and his pot smoking vulcanologist chum Guglielmo Poggi urges him to take a holiday in the ‘States.

Some how he finds Matilda Lutz the girl nobody likes at school coming along too. They call her “the Nun” because she won’t drink, have sex or do dope with them. So far so so.

The pair arrive in San Francisco where accommodation has been set up in a flat occupied by gay couple Taylor Frey and Joseph Haro. She thinks of them as degenerates. Well we know where this is going. Sure enough it becomes a plea for understanding and tolerance. This might be new and needful to some audiences but hardly for people who will turn out for a Muccino film with sub-titles - let alone missing subtitles.

However something exceptional does happen. Going around together in San Francisco, to which the boys arrived in the same way our travellers did from a repressive background, the newcomers lose their restraint. We get Frey’s back story which is presented as sensational. Haro takes them riding, cementing his desire to be with the horses. The boys’ dog sleeping in his bed drives Pacitto into sharing with Lutz’. She finds herself getting about (somewhat nervously) in an itsy bitsy bikini and they hit the gay clubs together - half naked baby oiled bodies.

The film becomes one of Muccino’s lyrical hymns to the group. The stop over stretches and they all go off on a trip to Cuba together (this one is into international flights) which actually convinces us that they are sharing an experience that they all will cherish all their lives.

This section is totally winning and it’s a pity that the film can’t do anything with the impetus it produces. Having the piece narrated by Pacitto, it’s least interesting character, doesn’t help either. Matilda Lutz’ transformation is truly awesome and we can only hope she gets to do that in a few more movies, while Haro and particularly Frey along with the travel footage come across effectively.

It seems that this one is already in there with Bix, Intersections and Jimmy P. as failed European attempts to crash the English language market. At least they are all better than Rossellini’s Ingrid Bergman films. I guess that’s some kind of progress.

I enjoyed this event. It became one of the highlights of my year's viewing. I like to think I’ve kept an eye on Italian films down the years - art house, ethnic cinemas and VHS, SBS, their film weeks and even a few excursions into the home ground. Some of those IMDB entries have only my comments. However when I start checking out the credits of  films like Tenderness' accomplished personnel I become aware of how fragmentary my access to this work has been. That’s something I regret and short of leaving the country for somewhere with a functioning Cinémathèque there's nothing I can do about it. Too bad.

 

Barrie Pattison 2017