Quo Vadis, baby?

I would say that "Quo Vadis Baby?" is a good movie for different reasons. First of all the setting: Bologna, an Italian medieval city that, with its tiny streets and arches, is the right city where to set a Noir movie. Plus the photography is good, delivering the idea of a gloomy atmosphere both in the outdoor scenes and in the indoor ones. A change in the light of the photography can be noted when the main character, Giulia goes to Rome to investigate about her Sister's death, giving the idea of a city that could give her some straight answers to her doubts. The characters are well developed and credible and the plot is nicely built since it gives little by little hints to the viewer of the future development and about the possible culprit. However I would have expected a more unexpected ending and this is the main flaw of this movie.

The movie is OK, with some good parts and a few brilliant ideas. To me, Salvatores movies are sometimes great, often OK and a few times bad. The main characteristic of this one is that it is like a manual of all the common errors, horrors and annoying things of recent Italian movies. The story starts quite well and the characters seem interesting, but it turns banal and predictable with a lot of unbelievable and uber fake situations. The movie is set in Bologna and NONE of the characters has the tiniest accent from Bologna (BTW - one of the greatest accent in Italy) -the two sisters have definite different accents, one from Rome and one from Milan As usual the actors speak in actor's school Italian (why Italian directors cant put real everyday Italian dialogue in movies??) Location are great for cinematic purposes - Bologna city center with its covered passages and Old Rome with the river and the old cobbled streets, but no middle aged stripper, or aspiring actress, or shabby private detective could afford that (why Italian directors can't show us real contemporary Italy??) And what about the brand new, sparkling clean café' kiosk right in the middle of an abandoned factory ?? And the far too many irrelevant references to all those old movies ?? And the director's trademark marijuana smoking - so annoying

I think Salvatores should decide whether he wants to do nice, joyful movies like Mediterraneo or more real and tough movies about real and tough contemporary Italy like Io non ho paura, because every time he tries something in the middle results are disappointing

While I had very much enjoyed the film last night, Quo Vadis, Baby? was one that didn't really live up to expectations. To be fair I was benchmarking it with arguable one of the more renowned Gialli films out there in What Have You Done to Solange? but even on its own it didn't have too engaging a plot and felt more like a romance drama rather than an out and out Gialli film with murder, mystery and a chunk of exploitation thrown in.

Like your classic investigative noir film, we start with a private investigator, a female one in Giorgia Cantini (Angela Baraldi) who's in her 40s and a spinster feeling really miserable from her lack of love life, and haunted by the fact that her good looking older sister Ada (Claudia Zanella) had committed suicide many years back. Giorgia decided to finally re-open that investigations on her own because she had received a box full of VHS tapes, in what would be a confessional series as recorded by her sister. Back then blogs were unheard of, and keeping a diary is unhip, so the next best thing is to do what Paris Hilton does - record on film every little sordid detail of her life.

This of course proved to be invaluable wealth of information to an investigator, but for Giorgia it's something like becoming a voyeur into her pretty sister's life many years back, who as an aspiring actress won't think twice in using her physique to advantage, sleeping with anyone who could give her a role, and dabbling in plenty of vices, all of which dutifully documented. The mystery for Giorgia is to discover who "A" is referred to, possibly holding the key to her sister's death.

Quo Vadis, Baby? is like a film within a film, one which takes place in the present, and the other in the past, thanks to plenty of sitting through of those tapes that you'll begin to feel like a priest in a confession box. This technique of flashbacks take up almost half the time of the film, but offering no new revelation other than Ada being a cheap slut who probably deserved what she got. There's little worked on gaining your sympathy for the character, or empathy for Giorgia in living through such pain of discovering naughty details of a deceased sibling.

Complicating matters of course is Giorgia's messy love life, included so that some flesh could be shown in order for this film to join the ranks of the Gialli genre, which in some ways the romantic portion of the film stood out a lot more with its romantic themes, rather than knowing it had a mystery to resolve. And when it finally got down to doing so, it lacked some real punch as you can get ahead with its limited number of characters to guess from, and limped very much to the ending no thanks again to convenience and almost implausible odds.

Definitely not something I would recommend to anyone new to the genre, especially when there are other gems available which are more than worth its time.

Quo Vadis (Where are we going), Baby, is a pretty good contemporary noir story.

Angela Baraldi does a great job as Giorgia, the central character whose sister committed suicide many years ago. The arrival of a box full of video tapes initiates opening of old memories and old wounds. Ada is not seen as suicidal, but the holes in the story start to fill in nicely, with surprises constantly causing one to re-evaluate the "who done it" question.

Despite plot development being primary we get nicely tuned views of Giorgia, her sister Ada, their father Il Capitano and other players.

The cinematography is a bit dull, but not distracting. Even with subtitles I thought the dialog was interesting and carried forward the plot and character development.

The ending is very Indie, with surprises to be had and with some thinking to be done. Definitely worth a watch.

It seems that Salvatores couldn't decide what to do with this movie: some of it is a very weak thriller (and I say very, very weak), some of it is an attempt to explore the relationships between the main characters. Both things have been tried in psychological thrillers, but in this case the movie cannot hold things together, due to poor, superficial scripting, bad acting and a too dark, too dull cinematography. I'd say that Salvatores gave his best in other genres and in other settings, where he was free to look at the characters without having to think about the plot. On the whole, a B-movie, hardly worth your money... Vote: 4/10