This film has received some rave reviews and some bad ones. I'm in the latter camp.
It's the story of Nello, a hangdog 35-year-old from Rome who teaches Roman and Greek classics. Nello also happens to be a sexually repressed nebbish, so repressed that he is sent by his father to teach in Bologna, where daddy hopes that Nello might pick up a few pointers on how to become more worldly (and, with any luck, to get married and have kids).
This sounds like a great idea for a comedy-romance, and it should have been, but its pacing is off and it frequently falls flat. It is often boring and ponderous. Nello's dreary fascination with Ovid and other great Roman (and Greek) classic writers (although essential to underline Nello's character) doesn't help. They even speak Latin in this film, which I thought was oddly appropriate: a dead language trying to give life to a struggling-for-breath movie.
Neri Marcone plays the sexually (and socially) naive Nello with considerable skill, and Vanessa Incontrada plays Angela, the self-absorbed (and tarty) daughter of a doctor who loses her sight in an accident. She tries to 'rescue' Nello from his virginal awkwardness. Nello, of course, falls madly in love with her and inevitable conflicts surface. These conflicts are the film's 'turning points,' but they don't appear until about the 75-minute mark. This is a major reason why the film is far too long at 107 minutes.
The 'love is blind' motif was inevitably to occur in this movie, and it does, with an interesting twist.
This film is saved by the sublime film veteran Giancarlo Giannini, who plays Nello's father, an illiterate tailor to the pope. It was gratifying to see Giannini, a fabulous comic and dramatic actor, fume and explode on the screen and actually give this film desperately needed fire. Giannini's acting might be the only real animation in this film, which features long stretches where nothing really happens, the cinematic equivalent of dead space.
The set designs and period scenes are outstanding, but for me they were wasted. This could have been a modern-day movie without losing anything.
It's the story of Nello, a hangdog 35-year-old from Rome who teaches Roman and Greek classics. Nello also happens to be a sexually repressed nebbish, so repressed that he is sent by his father to teach in Bologna, where daddy hopes that Nello might pick up a few pointers on how to become more worldly (and, with any luck, to get married and have kids).
This sounds like a great idea for a comedy-romance, and it should have been, but its pacing is off and it frequently falls flat. It is often boring and ponderous. Nello's dreary fascination with Ovid and other great Roman (and Greek) classic writers (although essential to underline Nello's character) doesn't help. They even speak Latin in this film, which I thought was oddly appropriate: a dead language trying to give life to a struggling-for-breath movie.
Neri Marcone plays the sexually (and socially) naive Nello with considerable skill, and Vanessa Incontrada plays Angela, the self-absorbed (and tarty) daughter of a doctor who loses her sight in an accident. She tries to 'rescue' Nello from his virginal awkwardness. Nello, of course, falls madly in love with her and inevitable conflicts surface. These conflicts are the film's 'turning points,' but they don't appear until about the 75-minute mark. This is a major reason why the film is far too long at 107 minutes.
The 'love is blind' motif was inevitably to occur in this movie, and it does, with an interesting twist.
This film is saved by the sublime film veteran Giancarlo Giannini, who plays Nello's father, an illiterate tailor to the pope. It was gratifying to see Giannini, a fabulous comic and dramatic actor, fume and explode on the screen and actually give this film desperately needed fire. Giannini's acting might be the only real animation in this film, which features long stretches where nothing really happens, the cinematic equivalent of dead space.
The set designs and period scenes are outstanding, but for me they were wasted. This could have been a modern-day movie without losing anything.