L'anniversaire de David

If this were merely the soap opera which its form indicates, it would be overly extended and boring at 104 minutes. The fact that its principal point is making a tragedy of someone coming to terms with his sexuality, a first same-sex love scene causing a death, is unforgivably homophobic. This plays like a 1940s warning about the dangers of same-sex attraction, not a 2009 film. Tthe 'Liebestod' (Love Death) from Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde's begins, permeates,and ends this repugnant film. Could it be any less subtle? You'd think that at least, they'd have chosen an Italian opera in an Italian film! It makes 'Death in Venice' look lighthearted, and that's a period piece. This is not. Massimo Poggio turns in a nice performance, as someone else observed, but that's it. That 'Il compleanno' earned an award in Venice is shocking, as it is mawkish and unoriginal as well as offensive. No wonder it was never reissued on Blu Ray. I am very sorry to have seen it.

Maybe it's because I'm Italian but this Italian film is absolutely brilliant. Anyone who says otherwise obviously doesn't get it based on what the various reviews here say. Nor is this film for the faint of heart or the weak of mind. It is stimulating, thoughtful, and very intense because you never know what will happen next, a true sign of a great film. It keeps you at the edge of your seat biting your fingernails. But any film that begins with a Wagner opera is nothing to sneeze at and if you don't get Wagner you won't get this film either. Visually, it is nothing less than stunning, in fact may very well be the most beautiful film I have ever seen. The eroticism is unprecedented, true art, done so perfect that I sat there with my mouth open because it never borders on the vulgar. The cast is sublime, just about the most perfect casting you can imagine.

I am somewhere between liking and disliking this movie, so I am giving it five stars. What I like is the lovely performance by Massimo Poggio as Matteo; if the rest if the movie had been on his level it would have gotten an easy eight stars. But it was as if he was working all alone in an otherwise uniformly mediocre undertaking.

The story, the dialog, the pacing and all the other performances are more like a soap opera than any other movie I can think of, with overblown emotions, preposterous developments, a lot of yelling and crying, and almost continual minor crises of one kind or another - even convenient interruptions for commercial breaks (what another reviewer brilliantly described as fadeaways).

I am a gay man, but I did not find Thyago Alves attractive at all, so the fact that Massimo Poggio made his obsession with the boy totally credible is part of his achievement. His is a stunning, subtle, restrained, and deeply moving performance. So I can recommend this movie highly for his work, but not for anything else.

This is an overlong Italian soap opera about two fortyish married couples sharing a beautiful beach home for the summer; when the long-absent 18-year-old son of husband #1 shows up, husband #2 falls hard. All sorts of complications might arise, but the film just flounders around for almost two hours, until it finally ends in (you guessed it!) tragedy. (All those shots emphasizing husband #1's wedding ring were a dead giveaway that this would end in tears.) There's some nice scenery, a little eye-candy, and lots of talking and eating and strolling on the beach. This movie offers a long, slow haul to a limp, contrived finish.

Built on the theme of ill-fated love, this film merges modern cinema with opera and emerges with a hybrid which infuses the viewer with a morality tale under two hours duration. Emotional theatrics reveal the frayed and tattered mental state of these two couples as both attempt to keep the appearances of functional family ties and friendships. While some USA viewers may find the emotional intensity "over the top," I find it similar to the emotional intensity that was infused into American Western genre when it went Italian and added an operatic theme to the story-telling. While no bullets are flying in a "pulp fiction" sensational style, the emotional content and the poignant plot climax enliven a rather dull scenario of viewing yet another "Doing Time on Maple Drive" clone-film with subtitles.