I couldn’t sleep, that’s how big a nerd I am, because I was so excited about seeing Gianni Amelio’s L’Intrepido starring the consistently talented Antonio Albanese. In competition this year at Venice, L’Intrepido is the one that I thought would make the Italians proud, but I was wrong. L’Intrepido is a dismal disappointment.
It’s the story of an out of work guy who has figured out a way to eek out a living filling in for people when they have to miss work for a few hours or a few days doing practically anything, and this was the only interesting part of the movie. It was fun seeing him press shirts at the laundry, chop carrots at the restaurant, carry beams on the construction site, and toss swordfish around at the fish market. Passing some guys working in a sewer, he asked them if there was a manual to learn how to do their job and they said, “Sure. It’s called, ‘Stop busting our balls’. ”
I read that Amelio got the idea for L’Intrepido from a series of comics that he used to read when he was young about a guy that took all kinds of different jobs. It’s a cool idea, and had the film taken another path, practically any other path, it might have been wonderful. Focusing on this almost magical person who knew about everything would have be a lot of fun.
Instead, Amelio takes one more tired look at unemployment in Italy, saying nothing new and not even saying what has been said already very well. I don’t want to seem unsympathetic to a clearly serious economic problem but “basta!” It takes a very bad movie to make this collection of people in crisis and make them seem boring and whiney.
What a waste of Antonio Albanese.
I Love Italian Everything 