È la settimana del mio preferito…Luigi Lo Cascio! It’s Luigi Lo Cascio Week here at I Love Italian Movies. His directorial debut, La Città Ideale, will be out in Italian movie theaters next week and I am begging all of you lucky enough to be in Italy to go see it.
I’d worried about this one, worried that I could be objective enough to talk about it. Luigi is my favorite actor. He’s versatile, having played good guys, bad guys, smart guys, stupid guys, romantic guys and unattractive guys, all with an authenticity that is rare even in the best Hollywood actors.
I was worried, too, because I wondered that Luigi, with his reputation for being ever so serious and earnest, would make a movie that is too serious and earnest. La Città Ideale couldn’t have been a happier surprise for me. I got to see it at the Venice Film Festival with Luigi, himself, in the audience, and I remember him saying that he’d been so nervous, watching us watching his movie.
No worries,Luigi, you’ve done everything right with your movie. It’s a very serious subject matter, a man who is wrongly accused and gets caught up in a complicated judicial system. But it’s funny, just the right amount of funny, because, hey, life can be funny even in the gravest of situations. Luigi, who also stars in the movie, wasn’t afraid to make himself look foolish in the part, and he wasn’t concerned with making himself the hero.
It’s also a very thought-provoking study of truth and how much truth matters, even when convention says it must.
READ MY REVIEW OF LA CITTÀ IDEALE
I am so grateful to have seen it, but wish I could be in Rome next week. The film opens in theaters on April 11 and on April 14 at 10:30 pm Luigi will be at the Nuovo Cinema Aguila to talk about the film.
I’ve been infatuated with Luigi Lo Cascio ever since La Vita Che Vorrei, Giuseppe Piccioni’s anti-love story about an insensitive narcissist in a relationship with an opportunistic floozy; is it love, or just self-love? More on that tomorrow.
I Love Italian Everything 