Kristen, a follower of this blog and a lover of Italian films is in Italy right now studying the language ( Forza Kristin!) and was lucky enough to see Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love on the opening weekend. I asked for her thoughts and she wrote:
The opening shots of Rome in “To Rome With Love” are postcard perfect and should seduce anyone to book the next flight to Italy.The movie was fun, even though I missed much of the dialog. Just hearing Woody Allen dubbed in Italian was funny by itself. There were several story lines and the Italian audience of about 100 people laughed and responded the most to the story lines of Woody Allen, Roberto Benigni and Penelope Cruz. The story line of Alec Baldwin-Jesse Eisenberg-Ellen Page was hard to follow in Italian and according to a review I read was the cynical, disenchanted architect story line.
Woody Allen is an Opera director who discovers his daughter’s fiancé’s father has a fantastic singing voice, but he can only sing in the shower. One of the film’s highlights is a production of Pagliacci, you guessed it, with a shower on stage. Roberto Benigni’s story is a funny spoof on becoming famous for doing nothing and having no talent. Reporters are chasing him around asking what he ate for breakfast and what type of underwear he wears. Penelope Cruz, as a prostitute, is pretending to be the wife of another in the typical mistaken identity plot. The wife she’s pretending to be is meanwhile cavorting with Antonio Albanese, a very funny actor I just watched in “È già ieri” (Italian Groundhog Day remake), and I wish he’d had a bigger part in this film. So, is it as good as “Midnight in Paris”? No! Will that stop Italophiles from seeing this movie? No! I’m thrilled I got to see this film while in Italy. Ciao from Lucca.
Thank you Kristin! I can’t wait to see for myself what everyone is now talking about in Italy; the reviews are getting curiouser and curiouser (to quote Alice in Wonderland). Ferruccio Gattuso wrote for Italy’s Yahoo! Cinema, comparing Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris to To Rome With Love that “Paris is his (Allen’s) girlfriend, but Rome is a matronly woman.”
He went on to say that it was obvious that Allen loved Rome, but that he’d “not been able to grasp the exact spirit of it”, and that he doesn’t love it like he loves Manhattan and Paris.
“Allen’s perceptions of Rome’s charm”, says Gattuso, ” is all from a postcard.”
“Crowded with characters, parallel stories, and a burst of commonly known, esthetically pleasing locations and Italian music (did he have to use songs as cliché as “Volare”?) it’s almost embarrassing. The characters end up being mere allegories and social tics and don’t offer the minimal depth.
Ferruccio Gattuso is the second reviewer I’ve seen that has used the word “tired” to describe To Rome With Love; we here in the states must wait to see for ourselves!
I Love Italian Everything 