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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