A Taste of Italy

Cinema Paradiso, courtesy of www.amazon.co.uk

In the first of our holiday series looking at international film Vera Brozzoni takes a celluloid journey to her native Italy to find the new greats of Italian cinema. And if you’re not slathering on the suntan lotion in a Tuscan villa try one of her recommendations to get you in the Mediterranean summer spirit.

Besides being a cradle of art and culture, Italy has nurtured cult directors for decades. Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini.  But have these Old Masters influenced the current crop of film-makers?

Emanuele Crialese is now in his heyday ( Golden Door),but Giuseppe Tornatore is still the most popular Italian director in the UK.
He rose to fame in 1988 when his Cinema Paradiso won an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film.
This bittersweet meditation on innocence and cinema was then followed by a string of hits that made their way across the Channel: the surreal The Legend Of The Pianist On The Ocean (1998), starring Tim Roth and his biggest success  Maléna (2000), featuring the beautiful Monica Bellucci alongside equally stunning Sicilian landscapes. 

Nanni Moretti is an idiosyncratic director who has represented the critical conscience of Italy for over twenty years with highly politicised films including Sogni D’Oro (Sweet Dreams, 1981) and Bianca (1984), until he won the Palme D’Or with powerful family drama The Son’s Room (2001).

But after his triumph, Moretti didn’t rest on his laurels for long: returning last year to his old passion,  political awareness, with Il Caimano (The Caiman).
The film, a multi-layered satire of Italy under Berlusconi’s spell, screened at the London Film Festival last October and will hopefully find an English distributor. 

As for Gabriele Muccino, he has now become internationally famous with The Pursuit Of Happyness (2006) starring Will Smith, a rare case of an Italian director who shoots in English and is financed by American money.

Before that, Muccino had been a star in Italy thanks to his L’Ultimo Bacio (The Last Kiss, 2001 (remade last year by Tony Goldwyn starring Zach Braff) and sequel Ricordati Di Me (Remember Me My Love, 2003).
 His romantic comedies hit all the right notes and depict the 30-something generation in all its lack of direction and ‘middle-youth’ hang-ups.
 He is now working on his new project Man And Wife to be shot in Brooklyn, New York.

While Muccino’s works are mainstream, Paolo Sorrentino recently created a modern and fascinating style of his own and is regarded as an original artist.

The Consequences Of Love (2004) presents an apparently apathetic man who leads a secluded life and carries a mystery on his shoulders. The Mafia casts its long shadow -  but nothing could be more distant from this film than the usual Godfather-style flicks.
 Sorrentino’s subsequent work, The Family Friend (2006), wasn’t as successful and critically acclaimed; yet it could be seen as a minor flaw in a promising and refreshing career that rejects of every cliche about the Italian way of life.

The real master of Italian quirkiness is certainly Matteo Garrone: after a few little known films, his career has reached a well deserved high with award-winning L’Imbalsamatore (The Embalmer, 2002.)
The film tells the morbid story of Peppino, a middle-aged, short taxidermist who falls in love with a handsome young man.
The director’s following film, Primo Amore (First Love, 2004) is about a woman who starves herself in order to please an anorexia-obsessed, patronizing lover.
Garrone fills his films with unique psychological insight and  disquieting imagery; no surprise that he is less well known abroad and is currently struggling to fund his next work.

But... good luck to him and to all Italian Cinema.

Get your Italian films at www.amazon.co.uk

• add to del.icio.us
• digg this article!