Gabriele Muccino
L'Ultimo Bacio

When directors like Muccino and his films are hailed on television and in newspapers as the best expression of current Italian cinema, it's clear that the latter has not just reached the end of the meal but is already at the coffee and limoncello stage. If there's one thing that drives me mad, it's hearing people rave on TV about a depth of content that, in my view, is non-existent. Because the much-celebrated "L'ultimo Bacio" is one of the most overrated hoaxes in history, along with its author.

The film unfolds before my eyes like something terribly overdone, with clichés about this generation of bored, nostalgic, depressed thirty-somethings with clipped wings due to wives, children, girlfriends, and common situations for anyone. There's no need to say that the acting is barely passable; even Sandrelli is below par; the only exception is the beautiful and talented Giovanna Mezzogiorno, always up to the task and head and shoulders above the rest of the cast; and anyway, she has brilliantly tackled far greater challenges. The screenplay is on the verge of ridiculous, overflowing with clichés, and the tedium, the tedium, the tedium overtakes me inexorably. Not a single original idea, not a stylistic innovation worthy of the name, in short, a hysterical comic book filled with exasperating sentimentality, with predictable situations that are hardly morbid and intriguing. And then the ending, God, the ending! What are we, in Hollywood, where a politically correct ending is mandatory? You could have redeemed yourself with the ending, Muccino; maybe the male protagonist (Stefano Accorsi) could have ended up all alone, abandoned by both women, or fallen madly in love with a third woman, or who knows, run off with the Rasta friend to new, more adventurous and fulfilling shores.

To conclude, I can say this film is not meant for the thirty-somethings it pretends to portray with joys, pains, aspirations, hopes, illusions, and disappointments but for teenagers with hormones in turmoil and low standards, without demands and somewhat bourgeois. I regret to annoy or disappoint those who will read me and those who loved this work, surely not ignoble, but negligible and even the eponymous track of the soundtrack is certainly not Carmen Consoli's best work, who honors us with her presence in the film with a cameo. The committed and innovative cinema to be proud of should be something else. However, let's be satisfied and make the best of a bad situation, as among the various box-office champions like Parenti and Vanzina, semi-dependent directors with confused ideas, pseudo-minimalists, and other atrocities, it couldn't get worse, and even Muccino can serve to spend a couple of hours carefree and without particular emotions.