Giuseppe Tornatore
La corrispondenza

Three years after The Best Offer, Tornatore writes and directs The Correspondence, a film that unfortunately can be briefly summarized: a man dies but continues to be a pain in the neck. And it is not about cold cynicism towards such a delicate feeling as love, but a consideration that takes into account the numerous weaknesses of both the screenplay and the direction.

The Correspondence is the love story between a student, Amy, and a sixty-year-old astrophysics professor, made up of secret meetings and a dense virtual correspondence. During a conference the professor was supposed to give at the university, which the protagonist (Olga Kurylenko) attends, the recent death of the professor (Jeremy Irons) is announced. Nevertheless, Amy inexplicably continues to receive messages, emails, and postal packages from the professor.

The first obstacle the film seems to give in to is the so-called suspension of disbelief, which cinema generally has the power to create in the audience. To be clear, it's that element for which you aren't surprised if you hear Paolo Villaggio's voice narrating the thoughts of a newborn in Look Who's Talking.

In this case instead, there is a constant and endless feeling of doubt, quite different from the sensation that the previous film could elicit (for those who appreciated The Best Offer) thanks to an intriguing web of suspense, although in some ways both films are bound by a kind of implausibility. Here, however, it spills into the absurd: if initially, one expects a key interpretation to act as a spark to salvage what can be salvaged, as the minutes go by the content fades away and what remains is just some beautiful imagery of Scotland and Italy. It is indeed so that after sixty minutes, one wonders what new could happen in the second part, and in fact, little happens.
Thus, the romantic astronomical metaphor of the light of a star shining just as the professor's post-mortem love is not enough to justify the presence he wants to ensure by his beloved's side even after the illness took him away, and not even Amy's characterization deeply marked by guilt over her father's death suffices; it does not suffice and it does not convince: it really is hard to imagine that this idea of post-mortem stalking could make a woman happy; the simplicity with which the professor would have instructed adepts, each with a clearly defined role, to complete his mission really makes one raise an eyebrow; it is odd the way Amy is welcomed as the uncontested queen of the world by each of them, displaying attitudes that brought to the stage with just a pinch more realism could perhaps have evoked emotions, but posed like this, they result rather cloying and embarrassing.

A fairly neutral judgment also for the performances, with the male one certainly penalized by the now overused voice of Luca Ward, which in the Italian version is obviously obliged to accompany every single written word, and since it's mostly a virtual correspondence, the presence of these interventions is massive and thus perhaps a bit too heavy.

A novel of the same name was also derived from the film (or perhaps the opposite; it’s unclear from the Internet, but the preface suggests the former), always by Tornatore: it is worth making this distinction to introduce a note inserted in the screenplay, in which the professor's doctor, shown as the only cynical unemotional element who escaped his romantic plan, compares the protagonist's idea to a "cheap sci-fi novel story," almost to emphasize that those who do not grasp its pure aspect are indeed a cynical and unemotional oddity. I am not convinced of this, as I myself can be convinced that love is the great force that moves the world, but here an elegant engine is shown, and that's it, incapable of moving, carrying, and thus, touching emotions.