User Reviews

I liked this so well that my first reaction after having watched it was to go back and watch it again. And that is what I did. As with most any good movie, a second viewing is more rewarding than the first, particularly if reading subtitles has been required.

It has been a long time since the heydays of Fellini, Bertolucci, or Antonioni, so it's good to see a quality Italian film come out that has international appeal. The ambitious scope of this film, covering the lives of a family from 1966 to 2003, well justifies its six hour length. The story concentrates on two brothers, Nicola and Matteo, who take quite different paths, with Nicola becoming a psychiatrist and Matteo a cop. In addition to the brothers we get to know their parents, siblings (two female), lovers, friends, and children. The number of characters is balanced, not too many to be confusing but enough to make things interesting.

Director Giordana definitely has the eye of an artist. The movie is masterfully filmed throughout, and some scenes are so beautifully shot that you can only respond with a sense of awe. Consider the scenes that have Nicola wandering through a natural history museum with his daughter. The editing is flawless and the tracking shot from a distance that interposes various animals as the two walk along is brilliant. Or take the scene where Nicola is at the photography exhibit with large photos mounted on stands throughout the hall. This is where having the luxury of a relaxed time constraint pays off. Nicola wanders among the photos for some time before finding the one he is looking for. The mood of that scene makes us as anxious to find the sought after photo as Nicola is.

I thought all the actors were effective and was particularly impressed with Sonia Bergamasco who plays Nicola's significant other Giulia. Camilla Filippi, who plays Nicola's daughter Sara as an adult, is most appealing. And it doesn't hurt that all of the young actors are physically attractive.

The story is told in a linear fashion and it moves along seamlessly, which is a testament to the editing. I am sure that inter-cutting the lives of the various characters while supplying a backdrop of historical events was not easy. I particularly appreciated this as a counterpoint to the disjointed time sequencing and jump cuts adopted by so many current movies.

I learned a good deal of recent Italian history from this movie, but the emphasis was always on the characters. The point is well made as to how much our lives are shaped by the larger social events of the time. I never understood before how turbulent things were in Italy during the time frame of this movie.

I liked how many of the characters remained enigmatic. What prompted Giulia to become a member of the revolutionary Red Brigades, at the sacrifice of her family? Matteo is so complex and conflicted that I never figured him out. He could be sensitive but also subject to fits of anger. The only consistency in Matteo was his love for his brother, even though they were sometimes at odds. Matteo was prone to self-inflicted wounds--on a visit to Rome he sees his parents as he drives by them, but he does not stop; he makes a date with a girl but shows up only to follow her secretly in his car as she finally walks away. For all of Nicola's skills as a psychiatrist, in the end it is seen that he did not quite understand his brother either.

This movie does not dazzle you with technique but rather seduces you into becoming involved with its story and its characters. Who can argue with a technique that accomplishes that?

The gist of my too-long ramble below is there probably is, at least definitively within the film, no answer to the "Why?" of Matteo, and that Nicola as he ages increasingly embraces the status quo. Blame inevitable age, if you like, but it doesn't happen to their mother.

Way back, among some finished and unfinished novels that migrate to each computer I buy but that otherwise I no longer bring myself to look at, is one in which my Myshkin-like protagonist lies up a minor tragedy to cause his various acquaintances who have nothing to do with one another to show up at one place at the same time. The Russian Myshkin couldn't lie, of course, but mine did. Just to see, I guess: a sort of wish-fulfillment, curiosity that killed the cat or made the student's mind viable or kept the oldster's young and nimble. Lying is storytelling is lying. The act of writing allows, or allowed, me, playing god just like that character of mine, to introduce to one another versions of people I known but whose paths never crossed otherwise. A tragic, now late, slow guy from work somehow occupies my vacation-vacant condo and hits it off with my garrulous but uneducated father. That kind of thing. Or, as Myshkin, I grab one or another misplaced acquaintance, long gone well before my mountaineering days, and march her way above the timberline to some icy col only to play at not knowing the way back down while sweet panic and thunderheads well.

I don't want to get into most La Meglio gioventù's maybe merits, the pacing and rhythms gained by extraordinary length, the credible aging and acquisition of Time's wisdom, whether for growth or stagnation, in most the characters, the relatively quiet interpolation of passing history. But the sadly heavy-handed, grossly unnecessary insertion of Matteo's "ghost" into the closing scene between Nicola and Mirella made me realize what an orgy of wish-fulfillment the second half is. Suddenly, seemingly because Life or Time heals but maybe just so the filmmaker could resolve things for us, nearly everyone meets everyone. Even at six hours, a story's tick needs its tock. Whether or not director Giordana and his writers intended the nearly dead center division, Part One ticks, and then Part Two tocks.

If this is more than just a really, really good soap opera, then there have to be ambiguity, loose ends, disappointments that come more from life's constraints than from audiences' need for reassurance and resolution. Why, other than to create suspense, does Nicola deny Giorgia's need be involved in finding Mirella? He's suddenly so uncharacteristically lacking in empathy. If he's hurting over Matteo, then he's selfish. If he's just being professional, then we're denied his rationale. I can easily dream up justifications within Nicola's character, but, watching, I sensed a filmmaker struggling to twist an ending out of events that in reality must fractal along indefinitely. With possible exceptions of Nicola's mother and perhaps his too-young-yet, barely formed though marriageable, daughter, Mirella seems the sanest creature in the film, Fate's gift to this at least slightly askew family. Has Nicola even told her about Giorgia, and in what terms? Inevitably she will meet Giorgia (Tiny piece of a six-hour sequel?!), but the film denies us the experience.

Matteo's so ever-present, and all the more so as the film progresses, in no small part because of Giorgia's obsession, that that bit of magic realism offended me as a viewer. Don't plaster on the screen what's already there: don't double images. Besides, I'm not at all certain the living Matteo would have been so generous. The sequence suggests suicide's a path to peace of mind, a return to balance or to freedom from self (What?! Does Matteo reach Enlightenment? Aurrgh!), but no one can know this. Are the filmmakers saying that Matteo by self-abnegation, self-destruction, restored balance to his family? Probably not, but how cruel the suggestion! Even so Matteo's the glue here, the MacGuffin, a key of some sort. I've sat through enough director Q & As to suspect there may be no explanation. Ambiguity's a storyteller's tool. Ambiguity, red herrings, in stories not by genre mysteries cue ineptness from hacks, but deliberation from pros. Matteo's case abounds in red herrings. Despite the transvestite, I don't think he's gay (all I saw in the episode was self-loathing, and nowadays they would have simply told us so; the day he first flirts with Mirella, despite his holding back, he seems no less enthralled than Nicola will be later). Despite the cop stuff, the look, the gun, I don't think he's political (they could have involved him against Nicola's terrorist love but don't; Nicola though, by surviving so wholeheartedly within the status quo does come off political). Surely each of us, as I think the filmmakers intend, will find a different key to Matteo. Empson, writing about ambiguity, usually says not that one or another reading is "it," but that all are present and in play. Matteo's mystery allows the filmmakers' artifice to breathe. If I see any clue, it lies way back, the day or two with Giorgia, when she, if not he, knew him already a soul broken in some way that her experience had taught her to understand. Whatever was wrong with him likely was already wrong then. I don't know what it was, but banishing from the film's close the first and only character who "got it" seems to doom the whole family, if only in the sense of their not "getting it" about Matteo and Giorgia. It seriously undercuts that silly ghost-Matteo scene.

I know too little to speak but recall vaguely that there may be a genetic tendency to suicide: sort of a no-fault clause.

Luigi Lo Cascio as Nicola, incidentally, looks like both Jean-Pierre Léaud and Dustin Hoffman, but, even saying that, I can't see that those two ever behave quite alike.

As an Italian who goes abroad sometimes, I was often confronted with people asking me how come I had not seen this movie. And I had pretty much liked "I Cento Passi" and "Pasolini un delitto italiano", and loved "Maledetti vi amero'", from the same director. Still, there was something in the way people spoke about this movie that made me doubt. Or maybe it was something about the kind of people who liked it.

While watching this movie you realize that there are three families that are involved in pretty much every important event in contemporary Italian history. One is more a collection of families, called Cosa Nostra. The other one is a peculiar kind of family: a fraternity called P2, which is ruling the country by now. The third one? It's the Carati family, of course! From the red terrorism of late 70's to the bombs of early 90's, there seem to be no major event where they are not directly involved. Does it seem an unlikely kind of plot? Well, if you package it as a neat and cheesy TV product it seems to work pretty well, given the amount of enthusiastic reviews and high rates it received here. Plus, it's 6 hrs long, so it must be good cinema, right? I must admit I was initially captured by the '68 scenes. It must have been the music. As the reel went on I quickly realized that the young rebels being portrayed were of those kind that made Pasolini stand for the police: well grown and well fed sons-of-someone bourgeois. But look, they're so open and tolerant with the lower class, they even have a friend who's not studying (Vitale).

The more it went on, the more I was appalled by the TV-ish acting (all except maybe Lo Cascio). Wanna look angry? Curl your eyebrows and talk louder, it will work. (SPOILER) I was soon emotionally detached from the whole thing to the point that I cheered when the cop jumped out of the window. And when the aging bourgeois Nicola calls the now successful builder Vitale to restructure the "casale" he bought on the Tuscany hills.. oh, my heart was filled sheer proletarian rage.