The Top 6 Things That Would Have Made ‘La Corrispondenza’ Slightly Less Terrible

Jeremy Irons is a celebrated astrophysicist and Olga Kurylenko is Amy, his student, in Giuseppe Tornatore’s ‘La Corrispondenza’ (The Correspondence).

Here’s the top 6 things that would have made it slightly less terrible:

A May-December love affair is one thing, but a teacher-student one is rather another, especially if the teacher is a full 30 years older. Jeremy Irons is handsome, even in his old age, but this movie’s unlikely affair makes him seem sufficiently creepy. If their relationship had been more age appropriate and not quite so parent-child, it would have been slightly less terrible (#1)

And couldn’t these two have been just a little more like normal people? She’s a beautiful, artistic and brilliant grad student who also works as a stuntwoman and he’s a famous, sophisticated, astrophysicist; they steal their precious, forbidden moments at out-of-the-way Italian villas (blah,blah, blah). I’m sure that this serves as the plot of a few successful romance novels, but if La Corrispondenza had been a little more realistic, it would have been slightly less terrible (#2)

I hate cheating husbands. If Ed hadn’t been married, it would have been slightly less terrible (#3).

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I kept wondering why the characters’ dialogue made them seem more like caricatures of worldly British people and then I figured it probably didn’t seem so completely wrong dubbed into Italian, the language in which the plot was most likely conceptualized; Italians can’t help speaking poetically. If the characters had spoken more like people who speak English, if would have been slightly less terrible (#4).

If the supposedly British student hadn’t had a Ukrainian accent (Olga Kurylenko is Ukrainian after all), it would have been slightly less terrible (#5).

Corny love texts, and video and phone messages are sent and received under mysterious circumstances that in reality aren’t so much mysterious as they are completely implausible, and if I hadn’t been asked to believe a completely unbelievable series of events, it would have been slightly less terrible (#6).

Make this movie about a plumber and the lady he met installing a faucet and then maybe, just maybe, Tornatore would have had himself a movie that wasn’t so terrible. Or if the characters had been Italian! That might have fixed everything.