A Girl and a Gun: Comfort Film

March 05, 2005

Comfort Film

It has been said that Italy is a poem which has been pressed into service as a country. Marco Tullio Giordana has taken the best of the Italian poem--the beauty of cities, towns, and villages; the majestic scenery; the warmth and humor of its people and their musical, liquid language--and given us The Best of Youth (2003), a six-hour epic created for television but which was transferred from video to film and its two three-hour segments shown at Cannes a couple of years back, then shown in Italian theaters with great success.

It's the story, opening in 1966 and running to 2003, of two brothers from a middle-class Roman family who take different directions in life which reflect their different personalities, but whose connection remains alive. Nicola is headed for medical school, and Matteo for a brilliant but unspecified career: he's been a terrific student, but something is bothering him, and he ends up blowing off an oral exam and taking a hike. Nicola's oral earns him a top grade because the physician-professor doing the grading gives him extra marks for his "sympathy." The two character notes stick with them, the one who tries to understand and the one who doesn't understand himself, they go their separate ways--Nicola becomes a psychiatrist, Matteo a cop--get other people involved in their lives, and before we know it, we have a small family story that has become a symphony. At the same time as he follows his people, Giordana refracts through their lives and those of their families and friends the great thunderclaps of Italian life from the catastrophic Florentine flood of November 1966 through the Red Brigades terror of the '70s, the corporate and political corruption of the '80s, and the mafia trials and retributions of the '90s.

Admittedly, there is the scent of soap in the air here. The Best of Youth stands at the threshold of soap now and then, and even teeters over a couple of times. but one doesn't much notice. Anyway, the problem with soap is not the subject matter broadly speaking (love and death), it's the execution: the tone, the tawdriness, the cynicism, the manipulativeness, the emptiness. Giordana makes almost all the right decisions when it comes to execution, and he gives us an enormous amount of pleasure. I think of his result as a movie counterpart to comfort food. I grew up on meat loaf and mashed potatoes (my mother was from rural Illinois), and while I have for many years eaten a vastly different diet, I still regard that fare as the culinary equivalent of the prenatal position.

Not that we are talking about perfection. The video-to-film transfer is by no means flawless; chronology gets muddy (some characters have to be born much later than is suggested by the film in order to be the age they are claimed to be in later passages); the aging of characters over thirty-seven years is unconvincing (Nicola at fifty-seven looks a pretty fit thirty-seven, for all the splashes of gray at the temples); in the last hour, the resolutions of various loose ends and dangling relationships come piling on top of one another until the script starts to seem like a rugby scrum; and, most annoying, we never do find out what's been eating Matteo all these years or what drove Giulia, Nicola's girlfriend, to join the terrorists. But Giordana gets an awful lot out of his actors, and that makes up for many sins. I will especially mention Luigi Lo Cascio as Nicola, Fabrizio Gifuni as his friend Carlo, and the very great Adriana Asti as the brothers' mother. It's the same Asti, now in her early seventies, whose gorgeous eyes set the screen nearly on fire in Bertolucci's Before the Revolution forty years ago; they do the same thing here. Finally, Giordana's own warmth and compassion, his willingness to try to learn more and more about his characters--like Nicola, his sympathy--take us beyond mere shortcomings into territory where such things don't matter much.

If sagas of Italian families give you the willies by definition, think The Godfather I and II, or Visconti's great Rocco and his Brothers (1960) or equally great The Leopard (1963). If the length troubles you, try this: go to Part One of Youth, assuming it's playing somewhere you can get to in an hour or less. I think you'll enjoy it enough that you'll enthusiastically invest in Part Two; if I'm wrong, I still doubt it will be as big a waste as the three hours you blew on the Oscar broadcast.

March 05, 2005 at 02:02 PM | Permalink

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A Girl and a Gun

March 05, 2005

Comfort Film

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