25/02/2014 - In Giovanni Veronesi’s latest film, the French model and actress is Fabio De Luigi’s exuberant best friend. But can women and men be friends?

“I am dedicating my film to those who know they love their friend, but do not have the courage to tell them for fear of losing them, and who continue to orbit around them like a strange planet, irresistibly attractive to them, becoming a satellite for the rest of their lives.” A new beginning for Giovanni Veronesi (Manual of Love), who after painting Italian stories in The Fifth Wheel [+see also:
trailer
interview: Giovanni Veronesi
film profile] (presented at the opening of the Rome Film Festival – read the interview), is now returning to looking at female-male relationships with Una donna per amica [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which will be hitting Italian movie theatres this Thursday, February 27.  

In this case, the satellite man, as the Tuscan director put it, is Fabio De Luigi, and it is not difficult to imagine the attraction he feels for said planet, Laetitia Casta. The screenplay, written by Veronesi with Ugo Chiti, tells the story of two friends, Francesco and Claudia. He is a good, reassuring, divorced lawyer and she is a French Italian vet, as exuberant as she is beautiful. Together they share the highs and lows of single life and they seem tied by a sincere and disinterested relationship. Pain for Francesco starts when Claudia suddenly decides to marry Giovanni (Adriano Giannini) after dating him for only three days. Is Claudia really just a friend to him?

“Friendship between men and women can exist but only at certain points in life and the end of that relationship will always be a positive or a negative seal whereby unilateral love is born,” Veronesi’s thesis goes on. Despite an unclear screenplay, the film benefits from an unexpected ending as well as a few funny moments (dialogues between De Luigi and the building manager who only speaks dialect are always indecipherable but for the last word). The cast also includes Geppi Cucciari, Monica Scattini, Valentina Lodovini and Valeria Solarino.

Una donna per amica is Veronesi’s sixth collaboration with Fandango, which produced the film with Warner Bros. Entertainment Italia and Ogi Films, with support from the Apulia Film Commission (the film was made in Salento). Warner Bros. Pictures will be distributing it in 400 cinemas. 

(Translated from Italian)