The six-hour
Italian family saga is as fine as filmmaking gets.
By Kenneth Turan
Times Staff Writer
Los
Angeles Times
March
18, 2005
Intimate,
epochal, quietly unforgettable, "The Best of Youth"
defies logic and expectation. Made for Italian television
with no thought of export, it shouldn't have captivated
the exclusive international film festival world,but it did.
Clocking in at an almost unplayable six hours, it shouldn't
be in a coveted Los Angeles theater like Laemmle's Royal,
but it is. Those who
see it will, quite frankly, not believe their luck. It is
that satisfying,that engrossing, that good.
Directed
by Marco Tullio Giordana from a 600-page script by Sandro
Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, "Youth's" story compellingly
intertwines one family's personal narrative with nearly
40 years of the defining events of recent Italian history,
constructing a story line whose various threads play out
masterfully from the mid-1960s to just about today. (The
film will screen in two three-hour segments, which can be
viewed over one or two days)
Rather
than pushing the envelope to terra incognita, "Youth's"
creative team has concentrated on pushing a different kind
of envelope, on making mainstream, traditional cinema as
good as they possibly can. This is a kind of filmmaking
we've almost forgotten exists: serious, adult storytelling
on a grand scale that deals with intensely dramatic events
unrolling like
a carpet whose rich patterns are a source of continual delight.
Despite
its strengths, if not for a series of fortunate events "Youth"
would never have spread its wings. An Italian scout for
Cannes tipped the festival off to the film's qualities,
and it appeared in the Un Certain Regard section in 2003,
where it was the surprise jury prize winner.
Just
as surprising, the film's emotional impact reduced normally
hard-bitten Cannes audiences to tears. Miramax boldly took
notice (six-hour films are not easy to distribute), as did
the New York and Telluride film festivals and theatrical
distributors in Italy, where the film did remarkably well
on the big screen before finally appearing on television
(in four 90-minute
installments) considerably later than anyone anticipated.
The
qualities that caused this success start with the remarkable
scope of "Youth's" story, which is basically the
story of the generation that came of age in the cataclysmic
1960s. Though the film's events are specifically Italian,
the overarching turmoil and upheaval, and the sense of living
in tumultuous times rife with social and political crisis,
have parallels everywhere.
Given that American culture is convinced it all but invented
the '60s, it's more than a little ironic that the great
film about that period should come
from somewhere else.
Sensitively
personalizing this story, elaborating on its themes of the
strength of family and the necessity of embracing life,
was the veteran Italian writing team of Petraglia and Rulli,
whose credits include Gianni Amelio's memorable "Stolen
Children."
Their
"Youth" screenplay focuses on the Carati family,
giving time to both parents and all four offspring but concentrating
on the two middle children, brothers only one year apart
in age, the warm and lively Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and
the more reserved Matteo (Alessio Boni).
We begin
in the summer of 1966, when the brothers' university studies
(Nicola's field is medicine, Matteo's literature) are about
to take a seasonal break. But Matteo's chance encounter
with Giorgia (Jasmine Trinca), a disturbed, ethereally beautiful
young patient in a psychiatric hospital, ends up having
a profound effect on both brothers' lives, underlining the
social order's injustices and compelling them to confront
and change society in ways that couldn't be more different
in approach and results.
One
of the great virtues of "Youth's" length is its
refusal to be rushed into establishing character. We reconnect
to its protagonists at a series of crossroads in their lives,
as they attempt to find and define themselves against the
backdrop of changing times. While they make decisions about
love, career, the essential stuff of life, we see how difficult
it is to know which choice to make, how simple actions can
have unexpected consequences. Everyone we meet becomes over
time not only older but more complex than the person we
initially encountered.
Superior
acting is essential in making all this happen, and "The
Best of Youth" is filled with uniformly strong performances,
too many to do justice to in a finite space. Special mention
obviously must go to Lo Cascio, the film's emotional center,
and Boni, who plays a character so convincingly enigmatic
that we never feel we completely understand him no matter
how desperately
we want to.
Fans
of Nanni Moretti's "The Son's Room" will remember
actress Trinca, whose haunting, hunted look is one of the
film's touchstones. Also excellent are the two actresses
Sonia Bergamasco and Maya Sansa, whose characters play important
roles in the brothers' lives. In some ways towering over
everyone as the family matriarch is the veteran Adriana
Asti, whose career extends
back more than 40 years to another family epic, Visconti's
"Rocco and His Brothers," and whose work for directors
like Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo
Bertolucci gives her both unquestioned authority and impeccable
skill.
Directing
a film this ambitious, a film that could easily have turned
into a standard miniseries, is a feat both logistically
and emotionally, and Giordana, whose last work was the well-received
"The Hundred Steps," has met both challenges admirably.
Working
closely with cinematographer Roberto Forza, who made good
use of close-ups and who shot in Super 16 millimeter later
blown up to 35 millimeter, Giordana oversaw a no-frills
24-week shoot that utilized some 240 sets and had actors
noticeably change age not once but several times.
On an
emotive level, Giordana's direction is a case study in the
effectiveness of faultlessly unobtrusive work. All characters,
no matter what their actions, are allowed the same dignity
and respect. This phenomenal decency and careful intelligence
run through the film and give everything the unmistakable
texture of reality. And restraint with the story's periodically
sensational material allows the heart-stopping, melodramatic
things that tend to happen in multipart family sagas to
convince rather than turn us off.
"The
Best of Youth" also does a persuasive job of working
the events of the day into its story. There are small moments
that might go unnoticed, such as Italians listening to their
World Cup team on the radio, and major situations ? cataclysmic
floods in Florence, industrial unrest in Turin, the government's
fight with the Mafia in Palermo. Also represented are countrywide
movements such as the struggle for legal rights for mental
patients (the screenwriters made a documentary on it, "Fit
to Be Untied," in 1975) and the depredations of the
murderous Red Brigades.
Despite
its length, "The Best of Youth" (the title comes
from a Pasolini poetry collection as well as an old Italian
song) is characterized by its determination to pay attention
to detail. The smallest roles are memorably cast (director
Giordana says he chooses even the extras personally), and
the film's sense of the music of the period ? from the Four
Tops' "Reach
Out I'll Be There" to Dinah Washington's "Time
After Time" to excerpts from Georges Delerue's "Jules
and Jim" score and Fausto Leali's Italian jukebox hit
"A Chi" ? is immaculate.
Like
all great popular melodramas, "The Best of Youth"
has a pull that is strong enough to be classified as gravitational.
Its length enables us to be involved in its characters'
lives to a thrilling extent, and its warmth and intimacy,
its belief that, as one character says, "What is the
purpose of life but to live?" make that involvement
worthwhile. The hectic nature of our contemporary lives
means that one day might not be enough to experience this
multi-hour epic, but no matter. Commit two nights to this
exceptional film, and remember it for a lifetime.(here)
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