Cronaca familiare

In war-ravaged Italy, tubercular journalist Marcello Mastroianni (as Enrico) learns little brother Jacques Perrin (as Lorenzo) has passed… In flashback, we learn the brothers were separated upon the death of their mother, and led different lives. They are reunited as estranged adults, grow to love each other as brothers, and are again separated by death. The co-starring lead actors give it all the believability they can muster - which, when you have Mastroianni and Perrin acting, is considerable - but, there is a noticeable age difference, they never look deathly ill, and are each distractingly handsome. As a result, they often seem more like lovers than brothers. Shameless as ever, Sylvie (as Grandmother) claims it's "easy to see" that they are brothers. Well, okay. Director Valerio Zurlini and cameraman Giuseppe Rotunno make this English-retitled "Family Diary" look amazingly beautiful - herein, a old radiator against a stark wall is a work of art. They, and the haunting performances, do make it worth watching.

******* Cronaca familiare (9/62) Valerio Zurlini ~ Marcello Mastroianni, Jacques Perrin, Sylvie, Salvo Randone

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.

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.

How this one slipped off the radar screen is beyond understanding. Against a very muted palette of tone on tone, in which the character Lorenzo's beige over-coat becomes a metaphor of his indefinite link with the beige walled world, director Zurlini weaves a fascinating story of two brothers separated at birth, who effect a tragic reunion in war torn Italy.

Marcello Mastiroianni here offers a performance of greater depth than "La Dolce Vita" (which is just as it should be)but it is youngster Jacques Perrin's "Lorenzo" which surprises.

His performance, (indeed the whole film) is a study in the power of the reticence, understatement and the unsaid. Mr. Perrin's eyes, particularly in the hospital sequences, speak those volumes and light those vistas that would be trivialized in dialog form.

An excellent film with a core of deep sadness, that avoids the fatal commercial trap of sentimentalism.

Phew! What a beautiful film! I'd rank this as one of the most awe-inspiringly composed and photographed color films of all time. You've never seen Mastroianni, until you've seen him in this film, walking around like an iconic black ghost in the darkly hued existentialist-to-the-nth-degree technicolor universe of post-war Italy created by Zurlini and legendary DP Giussepe Rottuno. What a stroke of genius to contrast the bleakest and most depressing of subjects possible with the most fantastically poetic and gorgeous technicolor cinematography this side of `Black Narcissus.' This is one of Rottuno's finest works ever: full of absolutely breathtaking deeper than deep blacks and colors that seem to have sprouted from some otherworldly weathered, neo-realist hallucination. And what timeless subtly paced, unerringly poetic, intelligent and completely uncompromising direction by Zurlini, the forgotten genius of Italian cinema, whose style in this film can be roughly described as a unique melange of neo-realism, Antonioni, Michael Powell, Jacques Becker, early Pasolini and early Bertolucci. It's easy to imagine how easily this story of a tubercular writer grieving the death of his younger brother through a series of flashbacks could've turned into not much more than a melodramatic tearjerker; yet in Zurlini's hands and through the incredible, tour-de-force performance of Marcello Mastroiani in the lead role, the Marxist-proleteriat-plight-of-the-poor sentimentality at the film's core transcends itself and becomes a deeply affecting, painful and ultimately cathartic meditation on death, despair, and the possibilities of redemption in the direst of circumstances.