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Rating: The plot: Timoteo (S. Castellitto) is a surgeon, around fifty, working in a hospital in Rome. On a rainy day, while he is operating, he is interrupted by a nurse (A. Finocchiaro) who informs him that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Angela, has just been admitted in serious condition due to a scooter accident. While his colleagues try to save her, Timoteo, in the absence of his wife (C. Gerini), in London for work, reminisces about the time of his daughter's birth. Following a car breakdown, already married, he met Italia (a subtle, subtle metaphor) (P. Cruz), a troubled commoner living in the Roman suburbs. At their first meeting, Timoteo violently takes Italia. Then he claims to have fallen in love with her. Meanwhile, he asks his wife to remove her IUD and have a child. However, he impregnates Italia first. He returns home to his wife to tell her he is leaving: she informs him that she too is pregnant. So he first agrees with Italia on an abortion, then reconsiders. At this point, Italia, who is the least foolish of the group, decides to abort on her own. On the day of his daughter's birth, Timoteo has yet another change of heart and decides to run away with Italia: in the south of Italy, she dies, as the abortion is unsuccessful despite an attempt at rescue by our protagonist. Once the flashback ends, Finocchiaro tells Castellitto that his daughter is saved. Gerini arrives. Happy end.
The characters: Timoteo (what a beautiful name, how many others have it in Italy? But also what a beautiful metaphor, indeed our protagonist at one point states that "God does not exist"... Timoteo reminds me of Popeye's enemy, Bluto, but I'm stupid, eh!), is what you might call a jerk. He lies to both his wife and his lover, is completely incapable of making a decision, engages in excessively violent sexual relations, and has no friends. Why should we be interested in the stories of this bastard? He is so unpleasant that one hopes his daughter dies too. Gerini's character, the typical bourgeois lady, is so insignificant that I can't even remember her name. The only interesting one is Italia, though one does not understand why she falls in love with the aforementioned Castellitto, considering he is fundamentally a jerk as mentioned above. To give her a bit of fake depth, as she sometimes seems mentally hindered, Italia is also burdened with an additional load (she was molested by her father as a teenager: and it's not pain, it's just a cliché). The supporting characters are irrelevant and thus not worth discussing.
The actors: Castellitto has a monotonous expression of a boiled fish throughout the film, whether he is having sex with Cruz or waiting to find out if his daughter will die or not. Gerini, on the other hand, is the usual swaggering bumpkin. Whatever role she tackles, we always see her chewing gum, her personal cud. Cruz is the saving grace. Her employment, moreover, speaks volumes about the state of health of Italian actresses: if to portray a Roman commoner (after we had Magnani, Loren, Vitti) we need to seek her abroad, there must be a reason. On the other hand, try to imagine a Capotondi or a Chiatti, among the young ones, or a Mezzogiorno or a Neri, playing the role: you'd be laughing for half of the film (it should be a drama, I believe).
The direction: talking about a lack of direction would be wrong. No, because Castellitto tries. He saw Antonioni in his youth and believes he understood him, or at least remembered him. There are some utterly nonsensical scenes: if only Castellitto had a bit of a sense of the ridiculous, he would have spared them.
After the first sexual encounter with Italia, Timoteo goes to the beach and writes in the sand, while his wife is diving into the sea, "Today I raped a woman". I believe no comment is needed. When he asks Gerini to have a child, she asks why. The response: "I want to see a kite fly". At one point, instead of watering the plants on the balcony, he urinates on them (I think, therefore I am).
The sex scenes (a romp with Gerini bent over a table full of shells, another with Cruz, in the rain, at the foot of a hovel) make us miss the worst of Siffredi as a director (luckily for the viewer, Castellitto has an execution speed lower than the length of a 100-meter sprint). (Apologies for the perhaps slightly vulgar aside, but the film in question invites me only to a long series of epithets, Ed.).
Then Castellitto falls into the portrayal of the Italian cinema's quintessential scene from the last twenty years: true, he is at the window, it is true it rains outside, but he does not hold a nice steaming cup of tea. No Castellitto, you have not done your homework!
Judgment: the summer question to Italian directors and actors is: "But is Tarantino right when he says current Italian cinema is awful?" And some even defend it (our cinema). I am convinced that if Tarantino had seen this film, his verdict would have been much more severe. A script that couldn't be more predictable, characters moderately spiteful and unpleasant, none of them interesting, direction without any creativity and with the use of metaphor worthy of a third-grade repeater, actors ready for at most a soap opera. In conclusion: the Weltanschauung is given by a Vasco Rossi song!!! Further comments: the film is terrible.
Afterword: why talk about this agony? Last week, the week of Bergman and Antonioni's death, Canale 5 had the brilliant idea of airing this monstrosity in prime time. Too much to hope for that once in their life Mediaset, instead of thinking about money, would honor culture and art (it should be noted that, although I found the film terrible, it was relatively successful, both critically and publicly). That said, since I am so foolish as to always give Italian cinema one more chance, I recorded it and watched it. I suffered for it. Why do these three or four Roman bourgeoisies, instead of washing their dirty laundry at home, write books and make films? Their worries are mediocre. With what presumption can they think of bringing out something less than mediocre? Castellitto then is pathetic: he is with a woman (Margaret Mazzantini, author of the novel from which the film was adapted) who has such an opinion of men, including her own (false, indifferent, incapable of love and sex), that instead of telling her off, he makes a film about it. Fantastic. They both have such a narrow-minded worldview, narrow-minded perhaps being the adjective most fitting, that I can only give them one piece of advice: end it all. But above all, stop making books and films.
They are means of expression that deserve more respect.
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