|
La meglio gioventù
(The Best of Youth)
(2003) |
Genre: Drama/History/Romance
Director:
Marco Tullio Giordana
Writing Credits:
Sandro
Petraglia
Stefano Rulli
Certificate: Ireland: 15s
|
Rome, summer 1966. The story of the Carati brothers
starts, and it will unfold over 40 years. Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) wants to become a doctor,
while the bright and melancholy Matteo (Alessio Boni) studies Literature
in college. They come from a low-middle class family, their mother Adriana
(Adriana Asti) a teacher of Italian literature and their father Angelo
(Andrea Tidana) a sales representative who chases the most improbable deals. Matteo is emotionally detached from his family, friends, and
girlfriends; the only person he can relate to is the down-to-hearth but
sympathetic Nicola.
The brothers and their friend Carlo (Fabrizio Gifuni),
a promising undergraduate of Economics, have a dream: after the last exam
of the academic year, they want to take a trip to Cape North. Everything
is ready – rucksacks packed, time and place of departure arranged – when Matteo meets Giorgia (Jasmine Trinca), and the plans and lives of the
three friends change, forever.
Giorgia is a psychiatric patient who Matteo assists in
his part-time job as a social worker in a clinic. When he finds out she
gets electroshocks, he decides to take her away from the hospital. He
takes the girl under his protection and, with Nicola’s help, brings her
back to her father in a small village on the Apennines. But soon Matteo
realizes he’s not able to cope with Giorgia’s mental condition, while
Nicola is.
At this early stage, some of the focal themes of the
movie have already been set. They are human, social and political subjects:
Matteo’s emotional block – a symptom he shares with a whole generation
torn between the decadence of their parents’ values and the difficult rise
of a liberating but inconsistent counter-culture; Nicola’s journey of
self-discovery that will lead him to embrace psychiatry with a humanistic
and highly innovative approach – an individual destiny interwoven with the
medical and cultural revolution represented by the Psychiatric Reform lead in the 70s by Professor Franco Basaglia; and, above all, there’s
the conflicting relationship between the two brothers, whose antithetical
choices and life patterns mirror the rift within the generation they
belong to.
The other key character is Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco).
Nicola meets her in Florence where, as hundreds of other young Italians,
they work as volunteers to help rescue the city from the terrible flood
of autumn 1966. Giulia is a charming middle class woman from Turin, a
skilled pianist who studies Maths to rebel against her mother’s ambition
of seeing her becoming a concert performer. The two fall in love and move
together to Turin, where they take part to the leftist student movement. But, in spite of their emotionally charged relationship and the birth of a
daughter, the couple grows slowly apart: Nicola wants to change things
from within the institutions, working as a psychiatrist in a mental
hospital; Giulia, instead, joins one of the most extremist factions of the
movement, the Red Brigades, to fight ‘the system’ with a gun. She
personifies that part of her generation that tried to spark a class war in
Italy in the 70s, the so called 'Years of Lead', an era that left a wound so
deep in Italian society, which it’s still open and bleeding these days.
In this struggle, Matteo is on the other side of the
barricades: he joins the army and then the police because he needs rules
and orders, to apply and obey them. In such way, he tries to overcome the
chaos and rage he has inside. But eventually, these feelings will get the
better of him: nothing will help him, neither the deep love for his
brother and for smart and sunny Mirella (Maya Sansa), or his passion for
poetry and literature; and not even the empathy, which binds him to
Giorgia till the very end.
The characters in The Best of Youth incarnate the
different souls of Italian contemporary society, of the best part of it. Each one of them has ideals and, in her or his own way, tries to fight
injustice and corruption; at times, they are overwhelmed by their rage,
and this rage turns against themselves or other people. But the point is
that they don’t give up. In these souls there’s no apathy, no
indifference.
The Best of Youth is a six hour long journey in time
and location, from the North to the South of Italy – it’s set in Rome, Turin,
Tuscany, Sicily -, from 1966 to the new millennium. It takes the
viewer through enchanting cities and landscapes, torn apart by floods and violent
demonstrations, paralysed by moral and political corruption, by the
Mafia’s killings and code of silence, by the inefficiencies and
distortions of the institutions, and by chronic unemployment. But at the
centre of all this there are always human relationships: love – the enamourment of being in love and the incapacity of loving –, empathy and
compassion, rage and isolation, the difficulty – sometimes the
impossibility – of communicating and understanding, bereavement, emotional
links that endure different social status, betrayals, opposite choices in
life, distance in time and location, illness and health. The
backbone of The Best of Youth is a thorough study of these relationships
and emotions, shaped by the historical events that have signed the
destinies of Italian people in the last 40 years.
Reviewed by Claudia Sandroni,
Premier Movie
Reviews 2007
| If you would like to
send comments or opinions to Claudia regarding this film or the review please send an e-mail to
contact@premiermoviereviews.com We would
be delighted to hear from you. |
|