When I tell people how much I love Italian movies someone inevitably asks me if I’ve seen Cinema Paradiso or The Last Kiss, and of course I have, but I’m frustrated that these are often the only post-Fellini Italian films that Americans, in particular, have heard of.
If you loved the sentimentality and nostalgia of Cinema Paradiso, don’t stop there.
Cinema Paradiso’s director, Giuseppe Tornatore, has a more recent walk down Italy’s Memory Lane, the beautifully filmed and gorgeously scored Baarìa. Baaria is the autobiographic story of three generations in the Sicilian village, Bagheria where Tornatore, was born and Baarìa is Sicilian slang for it. Like his earlier Cinema Paradiso, it’s very sentimental (maybe more so). It has a huge cast and a zillion plots and subplots and in my original review I (somewhat dismissively) compared it to a two-hour Barilla Pasta commercial, but EVERYONE ELSE that I’ve talked to has loved it, including my Italian-American husband.
Did you love L’Ultimo Bacio (The Last Kiss)? First of all, why? Josh Larsen from the Chicago Sun Times said it better than I could, “Girlfriends are bad, wives are worse and babies are the kiss of death in this bitter Italian comedy.” But if you really did love this messy relationship movie about men who are old enough to know better behaving badly, try some other, more romantic movies like Dieci Inverni.
Valerio Mieli’s ‘Dieci Inverni’ is the very sweet and authentic story of Camilla (Isabella Ragonese) and Silvestro (Michele Riondino) who meet when Camilla comes to Venice to study Russian literature. She’s a studious loner and he’s a goofy, immature kid and they like each other but at first are too different to be anything but friends.
It’s called 10 Winters and it’s just that, their winters. Whatever happens to Camilla and Silvestro during the spring, summer and fall, we can’t know for sure. So when during one winter they’ve had a terrible falling out and you think it’s over for them and it cuts to the following winter, you’re left to fill in the gaps, decide for yourself how they’ve patched things up and are friends again.
If you remember liking Io Non Ho Paura (I’m Not Scared), I’m with you; it’s a great story of a boy who discovers another boy who the adults in his life have kidnapped. This film is based on a true story, probably lots of true stories, because the ’70s and ’80s in Italy were known as “gli anni di piombo” – the years of lead, and very tumultuous, with terrorists groups kidnapping and murdering rich and powerful people.
There are lots of other movies about those years, most notably Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno Notte (Good Morning, Night), about the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. His death, a horrible and tragic loss, did not unite the country in a revolutionary coup, as the Red Brigades thought it would. When the government and even the Vatican refused to negotiate Moro’s release, it strenghtened and unified the Democrazia Cristiana, and weakened the Brigate Rosse.
If you loved Silvio Soldini’s Pane e Tulipani (Bread and Tulips), well of course you did. It’s wonderful. Watch it again.
I Love Italian Everything 