Cosimo E Nicole

I’d been really looking forward to watching Cosimo e Nicole starring Riccardo Scamarcio and French actress Clara Ponsot for an embarrassing reason; just like people who watched Mr. & Mrs. Smith to see Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie doing the love scenes that became real, causing the whole “cheating on Jennifer Aniston thing”, I wanted to see Scamarcio and Ponsot and the whole “cheating on Valeria Golino thing”; while they were making the film you couldn’t open an Italian magazine without seeing pictures of Ponsot and Scamarcio kissing, off-set. Does it make the sex scenes a little hotter? Why yes. Yes, I believe it does.

It’s love story about a relationship born at the G8 Summit riot in 2001 when Nicole (Ponsot), gets her head split open by riot police and Cosimo (Scamarcio) saves her. Watching the intense relationship, the sadder and wiser of us in the audience know, from experience, that it might have been the tear gas talking when they first declare their love. I mean, we’ve all been there, young, and swept up in something exciting and thinking it can last forever. Even Nicole wonders, at several points, if it was ” just Genoa”, and if they’d fallen in love if they’d met anywhere else.

Their intoxicating days of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, literally, are interrupted when something serious happens; an illegal immigrant working for their concert promoter boss has a serious accident on the job. Suddenly, fun-time is over, and the couple has to deal with real life issues that test them as a couple.

Scamarcio is just so very good-looking and Ponsot is ethereally angelic, in a Euro-hippie kind of way, and together, they do, in fact, make a very hot and authentic couple. What’s not to like? Though the story is full of holes, the acting is really good and the ending is perfect. Any questions I had about the fate of Cosimo and Nicole were answered in the film’s last, fleeting, seconds.

Cosimo e Nicole is available on Italian DVD with English subtitles, and shows up at film festivals from time to time.

Director: Francesco Amato
Writers: Francesco Amato, Daniela Gambaro
Stars: Riccardo Scamarcio, Clara Ponsot, Paolo Sassanelli