Un bacio

I've never seen a movie with a gay theme that holds as much entertainment value for straights, gays, men, or women as this movie. It has it all, and it ends most remarkably.

Imagine, if you can, a Italian (English subtitled) movie featuring all the qualities of a flip gay musical that suddenly turns into a traumatic and beautifully-scored but star-crossed love affair, and then ends with power, pathos, and a strong message. That's Un Bacio.

The actors are superb--a gay boy Lorenzo played by the almost too pretty Rimau Grillo Ritzberger, a girl Blu played by the beautiful Valentina Romani, and a straight boy Antonio played by the stunningly handsome Leonardo Pazzagli (pronounced pahtz-EYE-ee). They play three best-of-friends, more or less outsiders at their high school. But Lorenzo falls in love with Antonio, who falls in love with Blu, who loves an another man out of school. It's obviously complicated, and it only gets more so when Lorenzo finally shows his affection for an unreceptive Antonio. The drama builds from there in traumatic scenes that anyone who has suffered unrequited love can understand. The heaviest scenes are scored perfectly to songs like Hurts and Read All About It...so perfectly that you will want re-watch these scenes many times.

Here I must stop. An enormous spoiler is possible, and I will not go there. I will say only that is a movie with beautiful sets, beautiful music, beautiful faces, powerful acting, sadness, tragedy, love, joy, and a message. Ask yourself how often you see a movie with all of that.

Just don't quit at the butterflies and musical interludes. They'll make more sense in retrospect. This movie is...what is the Italian word?....oh, yes...

FANTASTICO!!

This little flick has it's own reality! It's a mix of cheerful hopefulness and sad truth.

Three young teenagers, two boys and one girl, who don't exactly fit in with the other students their age, befriend one another and develop a close bond. Lorenzo is naturally positive, happy, and pays no mind to the other classmates who reject him. Antonio is an ace basketball player but emotionally damaged by his brothers death. Blu is her own person and secure in her decisions and behavior. These three find one another and their friendship brings light into their lives.

All is well until their sexual desires enter the picture and their relationships begin to fracture. Antonio is still very insecure and cannot break his need to be accepted by his peers. His damaged emotional self-image turns the happy threesome upside-down. The story has two endings the real one and the idealized one that Lorenzo and Blu would have preferred.

I'll start with the bad notes. Acting and scene design might have been much better.

Sometimes they appear a bit amateurish: while a simple, real-life style might not be out of place given the themes, it's clear the attempt to be polished and refined in most of the film. Unfortunately a lot of times photography, action and dialogue delivery are not as sharp as expected, giving a bad feeling of fiction.

This said, the movie is great. The untold topics are social conflict, integration, exclusion, hate. The context is the life in a high school for 3 teens with a complex background (and who hasn't one?). Drama, comedy and tragedy (and even musical scenes) alternate effortlessly maintaining a level of depth, sensitivity and intelligence that can be rarely spotted in other "coming of age" productions.

Strongly advised.

The Italian movie Un bacio was shown in the U.S. with the translated title One Kiss (2016). It was written and directed by Ivan Cotroneo.

This is an interesting film that will grab your attention from the opening shot, and will hold your attention until it ends. (Actually, it has two endings. We all prefer one ending to the other, but we can't say which one is "real" in the context of the film.)

Rimau Ritzberger Grillo plays Lorenzo, a flamboyant, openly gay high school student. Naturally, he attracts homophobic criticism, but he is able to shake it off. Leonardo Pazzagli portrays Antonio, a straight, but different, classmate. Antonio is a star basketball player, so the other young men pretty much leave him alone. They don't like him, but they respect his athletic abilities. Sadly, Antonio doesn't like himself very much. He compares his own quiet character with that of his dead brother. His brother was outgoing and well liked, and Antonio is standing the the shadow of the brother he loved and admired.

Valentina Romani plays Blu, a young woman with the reputation of being a slut. (How she developed this reputation is one of the film's denouements.) She looks a little like Emma Watson, and she plays the Hermione role in the movie. She is the friend of both, and both of them adore her. All of the three protagonists are outcasts, but they stand together and defy the world. This stance works until it doesn't, and that's what we watch in the second half of the movie.

We saw this film at the excellent Little Theatre, as part of the wonderful ImageOut, the Rochester LGBT Film Festival. It was one of 22 films to have its East Coast or New York State premiere in Rochester. Un bacio carries a 6.8 rating on IMDb. That's not too bad, but I think it's better than that. It will work well on the small screen. It's worth seeking out and watching.

Seen at the Movies That Matter film festival 2017 in The Hague. Disappointing, storytelling-wise as well as how the fantasies of main protagonists were visualized. The clearest example of the latter is Lorenzo's arrival at his new school. We see him drop his backpack and dance his way into the building with the other pupils applauding. Another example, not much better than the former, can be found in Lorenzo's dialogues with his dead brother.

Plot and developments overall are not involving, and as such not as moving as the film makers apparently had hoped for. The composition of the threesome is a bit artificial, seemingly only setup to expose and thus emphasize their differences, their sole binding factor being that all three were treated as outsiders by their peers.

The story around Blu does not receive the attention it deserves. It leaves unclear why she still hangs out with one of the guys who filmed her while she was sedated and seduced by him and his three friends, something that appears later to be a full-fledged gang-rape, less consented than Blu herself tells everyone repeatedly. The rest of the school has earmarked her as "easy to get", words like sl*t are graffiti-d on walls all over the area. The footage itself was not made public, yet the seduction was known all along by other means (gossip?? hearsay??). Near the end of the movie when Blu happens to see the whole footage and learns what really happened with her and the foursome "friends", it triggers her to take formal steps against them, together with her parents and eventually involving the police. How and why that developed is covered in only a few minutes, hence left us wondering.

When our three main protagonists are taking a swim at a deserted place outside, Lorenzo makes his move to Antonio and touches him, something that Antonio apparently does not take well and he leaves without saying anything, despite Blu calling after him to learn why he left. I cannot reveal further developments, in fear of spoilers. But in the end, also somewhat artificial, we see the very same scene where Lorenzo touches Antonio, with a totally different outcome, leaving us outguessing how it will develop. This is where the movie ends with showing the final credits, leaving us wondering again.

All in all, I feel a bit lost because of the generally positive reviews, by non-critics as well as critics. None of them even touches the objections I outlined above. In other words, this is a minority viewpoint. Most probably, my age (67) will be deemed the culprit.