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PRODUCTION Italy

Love in the era of gay marriage

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"Acting for five hours with Monica Bellucci sitting on my lap wasn’t easy", said Riccardo Scamarcio, the new "face" of Italian cinema, jokingly. He plays Nicola, one of the main characters in one of the episodes of Manuale d'amore 2 - (Capitoli successivi) (lit. “Manual of Love 2: The Next Chapters”), a young man confined to a wheelchair after an accident who enjoys impassioned nights with a unique physical therapist (Bellucci).

The follow-up to Giovanni Veronesi’s episodic film Manual of Love, which revived the Italian box office in March of 2005, will be released on 750 screens on January 19 by the film’s production and distribution company, Filmauro, in the hopes of repeating the success of its predecessor.

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The cast is star-studded – Carlo Verdone, Fabio Volo, Sergio Rubini, Antonio Albanese, Claudio Bisio, Barbora Bobulova and the fiery Spanish actress Elsa Pataky – but the breeziness of the first episodes has become less light, at times even dark.

The reasons for this lack of levity are the cinematography (by the excellent Tani Canevari), which is intentionally "denser" and not very typical to light comedy, and the subjects tackled – paraplegic sex, artificial insemination, extramarital passions and gay marriage and the everlasting prejudices against it – which do not always show off their comical side in the film.

For the director, the films marks only the second part of am ambitious series of episodes to be made into five films dealing with all aspects of love: "A true manual of love does not exist”, said Veronesi. "We seek out rules, we imagine them and we try to impose them upon ourselves".

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(Translated from Italian)

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