Italians, for the most part, found Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love an insulting cliché, but the US critics have been mixed. To Rome With Love opens today and this morning at my breakfast table I read this from the Wall Street Journal:
To Rome With Love” is worse than worse, as inert as its predecessor was inspired. How to explain the inexplicable? For all we know the answer could be contractual—an obligation, if not to others then to himself, to go into production when he didn’t have a movie worth doing.
What’s on screen is a collection of clichés intermingled with outlandish farce or surreal fantasy. The clichés, starting with the title, seem to have been set forth in the hope that we would identify them as clichés but find them fragrant all the same: A young American tourist, for example, finds the Italian man of her dreams at the Trevi fountain. The farce elements excel only in ineptitude
But from the New York TImes:
One of the most delightful things about “To Rome With Love” is how casually it blends the plausible and the surreal, and how unabashedly it revels in pure silliness. The plots, which are cut together in no special order, obey different time schemes: Antonio and Milly’s marital drama (which involves a prostitute played by Penélope Cruz, and a movie star played by Antonio Albanese) seems to occupy a single afternoon, while other strands stretch over weeks and months. They rarely intersect, forming a shuffled, syncopated anthology, a variation on the multi-director omnibus films that were a staple of Italian cinema in the 1950s and ’60s….
…The limitations of “To Rome With Love,” as frothy as the milk atop a cappuccino, are finally inseparable from its delights.
I’m seeing it on Sunday – you’ll have to let me settle this curious difference of opinion. And about the above trailer – you’ve seen the American one; take a look at the Italian, with the actors dubbed.
I Love Italian Everything 