12/01/2010

It takes Bruno just one look at his terminally ill mother Anna to be flooded by memories. Back to 38 years ago, to the summer of 1971, when Anna was crowned "the most beautiful mother” of the most popular seaside resort of Livorno. Something little Bruno doesn’t like, embarrassed and ashamed as he is by his free-spirited parent.

The young, extremely beautiful woman lives in an urbanised, Demo-Christian Italy in the midst of a ruinous economic crisis and with the ghosts of ’68 behind it, but with 326 magazines sold weekly at newsstands. This "inconvenient" but profoundly innocent mother, chased out of her home by her husband and forced to kidnap her adored children Bruno and Valeria, will ruin her son’s life, forcing him to eternal malaise, until the three are reunited in the hospital room in which Anna lies dying.

Paolo Virzì today called La Prima Cosa Bella [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (“The First Beautiful Thing”) a film "on the desire to make peace with life, to find one’s home, one’s homeland, again ". The tenth feature film by the Tuscan director who better than others knew how to seize the legacy of the commedia all'Italiana, is perhaps the one that owes most to the films of Ettore Scola (in particular, We All Loved Each Other So Much), to his biting intelligence. Virzì’s gives his Anna, played by Micaela Ramazzotti (as a young woman) and Stefania Sandrelli, a restlessness that comes directly from Adriana of Antonio Pietrangeli’s I Knew Her Well, masterfully embodied by Sandrelli in 1965.

Virzì invested Ramazzotti with the second phase of her artistic career (and her life, seeing as how he married her), and through her pays tribute to numerous women of Italian cinema (in a scene in which Anna is thrown out of a car, the director "steals" the poster shot of Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women/Sofia Loren). It is not important to ask whether a "star" is born, but whether Ramazzotti can be "modern" in a cinema that struggles to follow real life.

"This is not an Amarcord, it’s not a nostalgic film,” explained Virzì. "The past is not related in an elegiac way. The conclusions are made in the present: a wild and heroic mother who encourages her children to embrace their destinies".

Virzì does not only masterfully director Ramazzotti and Sandrelli. Valerio Mastandrea (Bruno) and Claudia Pandolfi (Valeria) offer sharp, dense performances, and the entire choir of supporting actors (Marco Messeri, Fabrizia Sacchi, Sergio Albelli, Paolo Ruffini, Emanuele Barresi, Isabella Cecchi, and young actors Giacomo Bibiani, Aurora Frasca, Giulia Burgalassi and Francesco Rapalino) va al massimo and move throughout brave sequence shots that exalt their performances. Photography is by Steadicam expert Nicola Pecorini lives up to his fame as collaborator of Terry Gilliam, Oliver Stone, Roman Polanski and Bernardo Bertolucci, and the film was edited by newcomer Simone Manetti.

Written by the director, Francesco Bruni and Francesco Piccolo and produced by Virzì’s company Motorino Amaranto, Indiana Production Company with Medusa Film, the film is being released on 400 prints on January 15, the same day day James Cameron’s Avatar hits screens in Italy. This impossible pairing sparked a debate – Alberto Crespi in daily paper L’Unità rightfully wrote, "A healthy market should have the structures to valorizzare both films". But Virzì curbed the dilemma with a joke: "I’m counting on the viewers who won’t be able to enter the cinemas where they’re screening Avatar”.

The only digital effect in La Prima Cosa Bella are 350 extras who become a crowd of 3,000 at the Miss Summer Pancaldi Resort 1971 pageant.

(Translated from Italian)