Cronaca familiare

In 1945, Enrico Corsi (Marcello Mastroianni) receives news of his younger brother Lorenzo's death. He recalls their earlier lives. Their mother had died from complications giving birth to Lorenzo. With their father sick, Lorenzo was raised by an English baron's butler as a gentleman while Enrico was raised by their poor grandmother. Next, they run into each other in 1935. They have been estranged from each other and from their sick father. History is recounted as they come to terms with their brotherhood. Enrico has the drive from his poverty. Lorenzo has no ambition and struggles to find a steady job. His pretty face is not enough. He joins medical trials and falls ill.

Whether it's Enrico's narration or the dialogue, everything is in a hush tone. It is a sad grinding descend. It's a little distancing especially when we're told about his bad marriage but never meet his wife. There are a lot of talking but it feels melodramatic. Mastroianni remains a master. I don't think I can stay with this movie without him.

I wept like I hadn't wept in a movie for years. Director Valerio Zurlini and his cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno gives us a visual symphony in browns and dark yellows. The faces of the brothers Enrico and Lorenzo played with shattering truth by Marcello Mastroianni and Jaques Perrin have made a home in my brain. Their reunion with their grandmother, played by the sublime Sylvie, is an image, a film moment that I shall never forget. As it happens more often than not, the Italians have released this gem in DVD without English subtitles - not in English or any other language for that matter. I'm grateful for speaking and understanding Italian well enough to enjoy this movie to the fullest. If you do as well, I recommend it wholeheartedly.

This is a film so great that to attempt to describe it nearly forces one into poetry. The visual flow alone is like a walk through all the great art galleries of the Western world, and the camera pauses on many of those scenes to permit us to admire and study the surprising compositions and tonal pallets. The story is viewed oddly in the third person - I felt somewhat like an astronomer viewing the short-lived movement of a group of comets through the coldness of space and time - helplessly seeking meaning and comfort through love, but doomed to end meaningless and forgotten - following some brutish laws of physics whose study seems a shrewd exercise in futility.

The scope of action is exceedingly restricted - perhaps more microscopic than telescopic - in the end, it's all the same: universal and intimate, cold and loving, helpless, with an odd image of Joseph's multi-colored coat haunting the mind - yet another symbolic object long rotted into the dust as must all symbols.

This is the work of people who have a very mature, objective understanding of life and who, without romanticizing or distorting or euphemizing, have created something both true and extraordinarily beautiful.

This is one of the most moving films ever made. The atmosphere, the settings, the use of colour and the superb mastery of Zurlini's hand make Mastroianni and Perrin reach unthought-of characterisations of the two unhappy brothers. This is not a movie for all audiences. Its own qualities make it selective in itself. All the misery, sorrow, suffering and delicacy of the feelings that pervade the life of the two characters are brought to life with a sort of detachment and (paradoxically as it may seem) intimacy seldom seen in the screen. Absolutely a must. When will this masterpiece be available on DVD ?

I watched this on TCM and there was something wrong. when Enrico thinks about his brother in voice over, (as if he is writing an autobiography,) instead of Marcello's voice, some idiot dubbed in a ridiculous American actor's voice. firstly, the dubbed voice is all wrong in tone...it's as if the actor were from Car54 or Dragnet, and secondly, the voice reads the lines in the third person, often with bad translation!!!

So you have Enrico remembering his brother, and relating his recollections to the audience in the first person, but you have a voice over going "Enrico says", and "Enrico thinks",...it's a travesty.

This film is somewhat too sentimental, and slightly overwrought, but it has touching and truthful scenes as well. too bad that just when you become involved, some American butchery intrudes. 6/10.