Writing this blog I have “met” the most interesting people that share my interest in Italian movies and Gilles, a really nice French guy who seems to split his time between France and New York is one of them. He must be in France right now, because I got a message from him yesterday about a movie he’s just seen there, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s ‘Un Château En Italie‘; it opens in Italy today as Un Castello In Italia and (hopefully) one day in the US as A Castle In Italy.
“Hi Cheri, Just saw the last film of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi ” A Castle in Italy ” it is a brilliant work full of life. funny ,a bit nostalgic, sensitive and well acted. Valeria is becoming a top director and actress …” wrote Gilles.
I’ve been thinking about Valeria Bruni Tedeschi a lot lately. With an Italian father and a French mother, she was born in Italy and raised bilingual in Paris when her family became a target of the Red Brigades in the 80s. Her very famous sister Carla Bruni was the first lady of France for a while there, but Valeria has made her mark as an actress in films like Roberto Andò’s ‘Viva la Libertà’ and Ridley Scott’s ‘A Good Year’.
In A Castle In Italy, which premiered in competition at Cannes this past May, is a French, Italian, and English language movie and stars Bruni-Tedeschi and some of our favorites, Filippo Timi and Silvio Orlando.
Being called “semi-autobiographical”, (her sister Carla seems to be missing from the story) , the film is about Louise (Bruni-Tedeschi), who has a castle for sale and a brother with AIDS (Filippo Timi). “It’s a family of degenerates, spoilt kids. The prince and princess of Castagneto!“, says their gardener. The family, forced to sell the family home after their father dies, is “torn from a happy past and the difficulties of finding a path towards the future. In this in-between period which strips itself down, sterile and morbid, traversed by frantic efforts to make something rise from the ashes or kick over the traces of the unavoidable, family ties focus on essentials, just like the director, who does not attempt to densify her plot artificially but to come as close as she can to the often disjointed reality of human existence.” writes Fabien Lemercier in his Cineuropa review.
We can also look for Bruni-Tedeschi in the upcoming Paolo Virzì film ‘Il Capitale Umano’.
Director: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
Writers: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Noémie Lvovsky
Stars: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Louis Garrel, Filippo Timi
I Love Italian Everything 