At Rome’s Teatro Valle di Roma in 2006 I saw the staged version of Due Partite, written and directed by Cristina Comencini and starring Margherita Buy, Isabella Ferrari, and Marina Massironi. It was a dream come true for an Italian movie lover and I was so particularly excited to see Buy and Massironi on stage. It was dialogue driven and there wasn’t a lot of action, making it hard for me, an Italian language student, to get everything that was going, on but I got enough of it and had a great time. In it, four women in 1964 get together to play cards, bitch about their husbands, and comfort/terrorize one of them about the upcoming birth of her daughter. Years later, that daughter and the daughters of the other women get together and do a lot of the same.
So when in 2009 director Enzo Monteleone made it a movie, I couldn’t wait to watch it again and see what I’d missed. Gabriella, played by Margherita Buy, is married to a tyrant, Claudia, played by Marina Massironi, is the mother of three with a husband who cheats on her, and Sofia, played by Paola Cortellesi is an unhappy wife who is cheating on her husband. Beatrice, played by Isabella Ferrari, is nervously pregnant and her friends are not calming her fears about marriage and motherhood as they argue about what it means to be a woman in the 60s.
Fast forward twenty some years when one of the women dies and the daughters gather around the same table; though their mothers had dreamed that life would be better for them, the problems really haven’t changed very much and they are unhappy in much the same way that their mothers were.
Plays like this, all talk and with nothing much really happening, have limited appeal, and a movie based on a play like that will have even less. Watching women sit around a table evaluating their existence is pretty heavy stuff, even with the bits of humor that Comencini interjects. I enjoyed it because the actresses are some of my favorites, the Mad Men era clothes are great, and the scene in which they cheer themselves up singing Mina’s “Se Telefonando” is priceless. Otherwise, Due Partite is too “stagey” and not very entertaining unless you’re me and love Italian movies.
Margherita Buy … Gabriella
Isabella Ferrari … Beatrice
Marina Massironi … Claudia
Paola Cortellesi … Sofia
Carolina Crescentini … Sara
Valeria Milillo … Cecilia
Claudia Pandolfi … Rossana
Alba Rohrwacher … Giulia
I Love Italian Everything 