Monteleone plays “games” with all-female cast
After selling out theatres nationwide, Cristina Comencini’s play Due partite (“Two Games”) has been made into a film by Enzo Monteleone and will be released on March 6 by 01 Distribution on 200 screens. Produced by Cattleya and RAI Cinema, the project came about after the play’s first run in Rome ended.
"Brilliant dialogue, well-defined characters – it was only natural to think of a film adaptation," said the director, best known for El Alamein and as screenwriter for, among others, Gabriele Salvatores (including Mediterraneo), Carlo Mazzacurati, Giuseppe Piccioni, Alessandro D'Alatri and Comencini. "Cristina told me right away that she didn’t have enough distance from the play to turn it into a film," so he took on this story of eight women.
Due partite [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is a smart comedy with melancholy overtones and features an all-female cast. In the first half, set in the 1960s, four friends (Margherita Buy, Isabella Ferrari, Marina Massironi and Paola Cortellesi) share their feelings, hopes and dreams over canasta. As they play, humiliations and frustrations emerge, lives of freedom and passion given up to become suffocated housewives with children to raise, surrounded by betrayals and lies.
Although the referendum legalising divorce in Italy did not come until 1974, the seeds of the feminist revolution were already planted and not coincidentally a magazine sports a cover story entitled "The New European Woman".
Thirty years later, the women’s four daughters are brought together after one of the mothers has committed suicide. Carolina Crescentini, Valeria Milillo, Claudia Pandolfi and Alba Rohrwacher – in the theatre the same actresses played both generations of women – express the neuroses and dissatisfactions of modern women, though perhaps not as convincingly as the older cast.
The issues seem different yet are the same: work, relationships with men, maternity. The film offers no answers to women's identities, but offers a sincere look into their lives.
(Translated from Italian)
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