Fausto Brizzi
Notte Prima Degli Esami - Oggi

Hello everyone, I am Birbabirba. All of you from Debaser know me for my music reviews, but since there is the opportunity to also write reviews about movies, I am more than happy to contribute to the site. So, for musical reviews, you know my nickname, and for cinematic reviews, my nickname is Ciak!SiBirba.

My first "ocular" review will focus on "Notte prima degli esami Oggi," a successful sequel or rather, using a term by the director, "newquel" to 'Notte prima degli esami'.

Yes, because the talented Fausto Brizzi wanted to clarify that it's not a sequel but a new interpretation of the feelings experienced before the high school final exams, today, in 2006. Luca Molinari (Nicolas Vaporidis) and his friends Massi, Luca, Alice, and Simona are dealing with their final exams. They're not model students; with the sun warming the days of a summer not yet in full swing, they want to do everything except buckle down on books, facing translations and various poets. Better a gelato, a day at the beach or the pool, a run in the park; there's time to study.

The protagonist is Luca Molinari, a somewhat awkward boy who, during one of his usual days of idleness, meets Azzurra (Carolina Crescentini), a charming, extroverted, and independent girl, older than him, who has a passion for dolphins and is studying to become a marine biologist. The setting for this story is Rome, where Luca lives with his parents. His father, Giorgio Panariello, is an eternal Peter Pan who, under the guise of soccer matches, cheats on his wife with his son's math teacher, the beautiful Serena Autieri.

All of this while Italy proves to be up to the task in Germany and progresses towards the World Cup final. The style and approach that Brizzi gives to the film is always pleasing, the movie is well crafted, and the gags interleaved within the developing love story between Luca and Azzurra succeed in entertaining, but in my humble opinion, the film feels a notch below the previous one.

Yes, because essentially the space given to exam preparation is entirely marginal. Brizzi should have insisted more on gags related to the exams themselves. In the '80s, in the previous film's setting, Luca and his friends feared the exams, feared failure, which is normal for those who are not exactly "bookworms," and this generated cute and amusing situations for the viewer. Here, the characters seem almost indifferent to the impending final exams. Moreover, the absence of Giorgio Faletti, the "bastard," the classic professor everyone fears, who excelled in the first film, is felt. Perhaps the absence of an authoritarian professor in this episode is also due to the fact that today there is very little respect for the figure of the teacher in general.

In short, the film is called "Notte prima degli esami," and the "exam" component is so marginal that it doesn't justify such a title. The exams seem almost like a pretext, a backdrop to the love story between Luca and Azzurra or other adventures of Luca and his friends. As for the actors, Nicolas Vaporidis plays Luca in the 2006 version convincingly, at least as much as the '80s Luca. Giorgio Panariello confirms what I said earlier about the marginality of the exam component in this film; his is a good performance, but his character has little relevance to this film. The adventures stemming from his childish negligence, regularly patched up by his son Luca, are entertaining, but again, I would have preferred a cut more pertinent to maturity. It's too simple to replace all that with Italy's victorious path in the World Cup and too difficult to resist the lure of it. The rest of the cast, Luca's friends, and Serena Autieri, the math teacher, neither add nor detract. As for Carolina Crescentini, she undoubtedly managed to best embody her character and does not make one miss Cristiana Capotondi, who, in the first episode, played the girl Luca falls in love with, albeit with different dynamics and outcomes.

Overall, a film that is enjoyable to watch, but it is certainly a step back (perhaps two) from the previous one. It lacks the "magic" that was felt in the previous film.