Souviens-toi de moi

I watched "Ricordati di me" and it felt like a polite conversation that avoids self criticism and only accepts one's personal dreams and ambitions. A conversation that accomplishes nothing since the subconscious is too scared to embark on the dreams because there is no safety net.

'Remember Me, My Love,' as it is known in North America, is a great film that reveals the superficial mask of the family unit. It is the story of a family and its progressive loss of balance between the self and the public sphere of conventional happiness. This film begins beautifully with the personal woes of the family members and the audience can sense the inevitable tipping of the cauldron.

The crossroads for most of the characters is based upon their personal potential and their own self-interests versus the ones created by their environments. For Carlo Ristuccia (played wonderfully by Fabrizio Bentivoglio), Giulia (another great performance by Laura Morante) and Alessia (played by the very talented Monica Belucci) the question at hand is based upon their waning existence. They all seem to feel lost and monotone while they struggle to feel the youthful sensation of bliss and love. The opening sequence is perfectly written and shot to portray the Ristuccias one dimensional life. The screenplay, subtle in its work, progressively displays the inevitable choices to be made by the members of the Ristuccia family.

However, as the characters embark on their selfish adventures, they digress from their intentions and they seem to blindly be repeating their mistakes. Giulia attempts to reconcile her acting career yet fails to see the theme of the play as a reflection of her own state. Carlo, failing to write the last chapter of his novel, never completes his work because he is afraid to risk and lose. He, along with the rest of his family, tries to balance between the want and the need. A problem that is never realized - even in the end.

"Remember Me, My Love" is a film that could have benefited from some slight editing, especially concerning Valentina's storyline, yet the end product leaves you feeling like the characters - a false sense of hope but a bigger sense of loss. This film strikes a reminiscent chord for its audience because it deals with loss - the loss of dreams, the loss of love - and its battle with throwing in the towel. None of the characters experience true happiness however they've convinced themselves at times. The first and final shot sum up the film beautifully as it questions the choices made by each of the man characters. It's all a facade, so enjoy the show.

In the dysfunctional Italian middle-class family Ristuccia, the middle-aged executive Carlo (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) has a stalled life without passion, bored in his work and having a monotonous life with his wife Giulia (Laura Morante). Giulia is a frustrated and hysterical woman because she gave up of being an actress in her youth to dedicate to the family. Their needy son Paolo (Silvio Muccino) feels lost and rejected, trying to find who he is and flirting with a schoolmate. Their seventeen years old daughter Valentina (Nicoletta Romanoff) is decided to work in a television show, and is fighting to have an audition. When Carlo meets his former sweetheart Alessia (Monica Bellucci) in a class reunion, they confess to each other that their marriages are in crisis and both feel passion arising again. Meanwhile Giulia is invited to an audition in a stage production and to participate of a play. Paolo tries to make friends using marijuana in his birthday party, and Valentina has sex with different guys trying to be a dancer of the famous TV show 'Ali Babbi'. Their relationships change when Carlo has an accident.

Two years ago, I saw "L'Ultimo Bacio" on DVD, a beautiful and delightful movie about relationship in different phases of life directed by Gabriele Muccino. I was impressed with this director, and recently it was released "Recordati di me" on DVD in Brazil. I have just watched and it is amazing the sensibility of this director with the dynamics and feelings of a family, presenting a tale of passion, frustration and dreams. The realistic relationships between the members of this common middle-class family is disclosed though the lost dreams and passions of the parents, and the dreams and aspirations of their son and daughter. The cast is amazing, with a sensational Laura Morante, the stunning Monica Bellucci, the sexy Nicoletta Romanoff and the impressive Fabrizio Bentivoglio and Silvio Muccino, all of them perfect in their respective roles. This movie is recommended for those viewers that want to see a realistic, full of sentiments and never corny dramatic tale. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "No Limite das Emoções" ("In the Limit of the Emotions")

This movie is hard to absorb, partly because the dialogue is difficult in translation and partly because of the fading and mixing of scenes that introduce the 4 character stories within. Four people in a family so plausibly like middle class families everywhere, except here in Italy the members are more likely to be beautiful, handsome, suave, and worth staring at for some feature or another. Muccino shows us that the happiness we work for within a family is easily thrown away (no wonder there is so much divorce), but that the common need to have one place where we think we can be recognized and loved for who we are can bind even the most dysfunctional family unit. Each character here is struggling with ego. Carlo (the handsome Fabrizio Bentivoglio whose hair belongs on marble statues) wants romantic love and an escape from boredom of his job and family -- he ought to have had something different, but he doesn't, and honestly he is the middle of middle class personified -- a salesman working on number 8 sale. Guilia (Larua Morante -- among the most beautiful of Italian actresses currently) is hopelessly insecure but pictures herself as a great stage actress, which is might possibly be -- if it really was her obsession -- the real obsession being to retain the normality of her marriage facade. Valentina (Nicoletta Romanoff) is the a self absorbed teen age bod beautiful with the hips and hair of her generation -- so anxious for a bit role in a dreadful television programme to recognize her beauty. And finally Paolo (A Muccino relative surely) desperate for recognition of his specialness. All want recognition for the specialness and at the same time the security of the familiar. Every moment of this movie shows the tension between the desire for a self-perceived "fame" or "happiness" based on selfishness and the pull that conventional family love provides. These characters recognize true happiness when the routine is threatened and Fabrizio faces possible paraplegia. The other three cannot (although they do) contemplate anything but return to the beginning. Scene after scene develops the characters -- and portrays their dilemma of self versus family -- something many of us continually face when lucky enough to have a unit that is at the same time crushing of self and supportive of "love". The ending is perfect -- smile, Fabrizio-- One was left knowing that nothing had really changed for this family or the individuals involved although 3 of them appeared to get what they wanted -- and even Fabrizio got his "break" from routine. Maybe he was the unluckiest and had to smile the hardest as he built his selfish love on a dream that had no apparent fulfillment (NO BRIEF ENCOUNTER THIS -- just a desire for a Brief Encounter). I imagine this movie was very disappointing to many -- it was a treat to one who scoured the video store for something different and found a depiction of every day life that was hopeful and helpless and maybe the description of a happiness that is never fully satisfactory but we are required in the end to accept -- and to live without ever being fully aware.

Soap opera enthusiasts will love this film. Each scene telegraphs what predictable nonsense will follow. The only element rising above such overwrought displays is generally apt use of camera and sound to capture an authentic flavor of life in a neurotic sort of middle-class Italian household, circa early twenty-first century.

The plot is too obvious even to discuss in this forum. Others may do so, but I consider it an exercise analogous to a dog chasing its tail. Each main character is moreover annoying to the point of inviting frenzy as the only resolution to trying to understand what, exactly, each one is about. There is as well much shouting and physically running around, cell phones in hand.

Watch it for its sets, its scenery, its depiction of contemporary Italy -- a cosmopolitan milieu eschewing travelogue vistas in favor of modern kitchens, television studios, and panoramic street scenes in residential neighborhoods.

Providing, of course, that there is nothing better on the adjacent channel.

Yesterday I saw this excellent movie, and it is still lingering in my brain and my soul.

I merely liked, not loved, Gabriele Muccino's smash Italian hit L'Ultimo Bacio when I saw it, since its depiction of thirtysomething doubts and fears left a sort of slightly fake aftertaste in my mouth. Plus, it waned out of my mind in a couple of hours, even though I had enjoyed while I was in the theatre.

Ricordati Di Me is a very, very different deal. It's a delicate, multi-faceted, true and touching punch in your stomach.

Well written and well played - especially by the extremely skillful and absolutely charming Fabrizio Bentivoglio, who's one of Italy's most gifted thesps as well as the longtime boyfriend of Rain Man's Valeria Golino (here you see him pouring his heart out onscreen with painful, searing directness) - the movie brings you into the home of a dysfunctional Italian family not dissimilar from so many dysfunctional Italian families.

Meet them: there is the melancholic, romantic, slightly frustrated husband Carlo (played by Bentivoglio), who's an obscure white-collar worker who once wanted to be a writer and keeps a sensitivity that leaves him totally exposed to raw emotions and to the eventual unfair blow of fate, all of this while keeping as well a still-unfinished novel in one of his drawers; then there is his VERY frustrated teacher wife (played by the ever-classy Laura Morante), who once wanted to be a stage actress. They've got two teenage kids, one of them a vain and egotistical 18-year-old daughter, keen on only one thing, i.e. becoming a TV starlet (played by stunning newcomer Nicoletta Romanoff), and the other one a vaguely leftish, pot-smoking daydreamer senior high schooler son (played by the director's brother).

Nothing new or revolutionary here, be sure of that, but the whole tale elaborated by Gabriele Muccino about the emotional disintegration of this apparently average family is narrated with passion and participation, both by its writer-director and by the actors.

The foursome meet enormous difficulties in communicating with each other - not only the parents with their children do, but also each of them with any other one, and egotism and indifference run rampant, especially in the veins of Valentina, the young daughter, who's a truly upsetting spectacle to watch, what with her relentless pursuing of a tinsel world, a world made of garish make-up, TV studios and squalid sex relationships with one or the other TV beefcake idol, since this girl, while still looking very innocent on the outside, would do anything to be cast in some cheesy TV show as one of the decorative babes who strut and grind in the background.

So, when you see Carlo, the husband, falling again - after many years - for married and unsatisfied mother of two Alessia (the ever-stunning Monica Bellucci, here way more expressive and intense than usual), an old flame of his youth, you just cannot think, not even for a second, of him as a middle-aged philanderer, or of Alessia as your typical homewrecker. The rekindling of their love is something so pure, so tender, so NEEDED by both these characters, that you can't help rooting for them - and be heartbroken when things just become spinning in a totally unpredicted direction, which I don't want to spoil for you.

I also truly appreciated the open ending, which leaves the audience enough room to imagine whatever they like for the future life of these characters, who've just been, anyway, through a journey able to break - once and for all - the walls of hypochrisy that previously surrounded them.

Go and see this movie, you won't regret it.