Se fossi in te

A self-contained movie, that has all you can desire to please a tender summer night. Funny, intelligent, graceful. Standard acting, clever dialogues, no futile show-offs. You will love the six characters portrayed in the movie and will love to be accompanied by them during less than two hours. A nice, nice movie.

This is an Italian identity-swapping film from 10 years ago, which emanates that this comedic sub-genre never cease, popping up into my mind is the most recent Hollywood one called THE CHANGE-UP (2011), stars Ryan Reynolds and Jason Batesman. But this Italian one is a quantitatively upgraded version as it mingles with 3 persons' turmoils of their lives, and interweaving with 3 females whom they cannot eschew from their pristine life.

I have some trouble understanding the dialogues since there was not subtitles for it and my Italian level is still on the verge of B1 (which is thought-provoking by stark contrast with a Chinese film, in which most of them are too taciturn to let languages steal the thunder). Thus please forgive me if my review could be a trifle partisan. The film itself is merely satisfying and entertaining in a foreseeable scale, the performance is sterile but benevolent, three male leaders, Fabio De Luigi, Gioele Dix and Emilio Solfrizzi carries their characters with ease and a hackneyed happy-ending is implausibly welcome.

A petty mention, the sci-fi fraction (the process of changing identities), which literally lasts only 10 seconds maximum, is trashy and deceitfully naive. Anyway, it one has to fuss about that, he must be a helpless perfectionist, whom I don't mean to be in any circumstances.

This film is director/writer Giulio Manfredonia's debut feature film, whose later work SI PUO' FARE (2008) had been selected as a contestant in The 12th Shanghai Film Festival in 2009, which I feel more intrigued to watch (in spite of the fact that I generally distrust the festival's quality).

This is the kind of film that can easily be extremely boring, common and not original. People magically exchanging bodies with each other. Pff, please !

But Se Fossi in Te is actually a very pleasant comedy, that is original enough (despite the theme and the plot), and the actors make it right too. The humor is fine, and good laughters just happen ! This film is also pleasant because the viewer can feel that it is some kind of buddy movie, that the actors appreciate and have known each other for a while (most of them featured the TV show "Mai Dire Goal" for a couple of seasons). Thumbs up !

Too normal, too obvious, certainly unnecessary. It's a pity for the actors. All of them are remarquable.

But the lack of a good plot, and the direction...

Good luck to everybody (also the spectators) for their next film.