Una questione privata

As per the title, the movie could have been a great opportunity to describe the other reality than the war however is slow, flat, boring, zero changes, no texture. Se pictures are good and some scenes have a potential. Nevertheless the actors are not well directed.

First off- I don't speak Italian. The version I managed to find didn't have subtitles in any language. Nevertheless, it was fairly easy to understand what was going on. I looked up the plot synopsis and a few questions about the time period and was good to go. I really appreciated the moderate pacing and relative lack of violence considering how many people were carrying guns (almost all of them). The acting was very clear and relied a lot less on the actual speech than I expected. If nothing else, watching Luca Marinelli run around the Italian countryside with various guns and an interesting moral code for 80 minutes is well worth the time.

This movie does not deserve the rating that it has on this platform. I'm not going to lie and pretend that this work from the Taviani brothers is a masterpiece but I really think that it has many good characteristic and that in the end it is a pretty good movie. But let's start with the weaknesses of this film: Marinelli is far from his best interpretations, such as the Zingaro's one in "Lo Chiamavano Jeeg Robot" or the one that allowed him to win the Coppa Volpi in 2019, Martin Eden, and his acting is not great, maybe also given the fact that his character is not very well written. Talking about the strenght of this movie I think that we can all agree that the work that the Tavianis did behind the camera is the only thing that make "Una questione privata" worth watching.

There might be a good movie lurking somewhere here, but the Tavianis completely failed to find it. Instead, we are left with this muddled mess. One wonders if they shot a six hour version and gave it to grade schooler to edit into the movie that was released.

The Tavianis made some great movies in their day, but judging by this movie, that day is past.

On the plus side, it is pretty.