On paper this Italian movie should have been right up my alley, being set at Turin's Italian National Museum of Cinema and intercut with nostalgic clips from silent cinema especially from the divine Buster. However I was left with something of a niggling feeling that the writer-director Davide Ferrario was trying just a wee bit too hard to be winning and winsome, and this was not helped by an intrusive narrator playing nudge-nudge, wink-wink with the viewer to make certain we got most of the cinema references. What was almost certainly intended as a celebration of the glories of cinema and how it can transform our lives turned out to be done with a respectful but somewhat heavy hand.
There are three main characters: Martino the night watchman at the museum who spends his evenings exploring its delights, Amanda a fast-food worker whom Martino has worshipped from the sidelines, and her lover a petty thief referred to as The Angel. After an incident at work where she scalds her boss and is on the lam from the police, she takes refuge at the museum and soon falls under its spell and the silent devotion of Martino (who seldom says anything and who takes his wooing cues from Keaton). Soon she finds that she is in love with two men and when she is able to leave her sanctuary, the three characters try to work out their predicament. The numerous veiled references to "Jules et Jim" are to me a little excessive as the actors here lack some charisma.
There is in fact a fourth main character, the museum itself, the 19th Century architectural folly known as the Mole Antonelliana. The building with its imaginative layout and displays had far more appeal than the somewhat pedestrian protagonists, although Martino as a Buster-clone was not without charm. All in all, this was a respectful homage to film history, but not quite the masterpiece it could have been.
1 comment:
A rather pedestrian approach which was not, as you say, saved by the film
references - a pity it was not better.
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