Love and other detours1/7/2024 Every day, there was a two-hour walk through the neighbourhood forest, with occasional detours to the nearby park. At the beginning of COVID-19, when her two young girls were at home full time while she and her husband were juggling work, their afternoon routine quickly moved outside. The score, also by Pivio and De Scalzi, further complements the material and ups the tension whenever necessary.Outdoor time has always been a priority for Deborah Bakker and her family, and even more so during the pandemic. The three women responsible for the film’s overall look - director of photography Francesca Amitrano, production designer Noemi Marchica and costume designer Daniela Salernitano - all do solid work, even if Amitrano’s color correction job is very uneven. For his part, Buccirosso manages the difficult feat of making Don Vincenzo seem both powerful and pathetic. The reason audiences will still believe in their love story is because Morelli can pull off cool nonchalance like no one’s business when he’s not singing, and the actor playing the younger version of the character in some flashbacks has the kind of guileless innocence that audiences just know must still be buried somewhere deep inside the hardened Ciro. The contrast with Raiz, a born entertainer and his frequent onscreen partner, just highlights the problem. ![]() before, looks a tad uncomfortable when he’s required to sing. In terms of the male leads, Morelli, who looks like the Italian cousin of Armie Hammer and who has worked with the Manetti Bros. But Gerini’s Donna Maria here fails to comprehend the dead language whenever her Latin adage-spouting lawyer turns up. There’s also a hilarious in-joke that alludes to Gerini’s turn in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, in which, as Pontius Pilate’s wife, she spoke Latin. In the acting department, besides Rossi, Gerini is the standout as the aggrieved widow, going full-out over-the-top in a performance that knows this is explicitly not a film (or TV series) like the uber-naturalistic Gomorrah. Since these characters otherwise don’t have any personalities that might disprove what the joke is insinuating, this is a problem. But there are also a couple of moments in which foreigners become the butt of a joke, scoring easy laughs with what is essentially racism packaged as humor. The Neapolitans are known for their colorful cursing, and some of it is used to humorous effect here, including by both Don Vincenzo and Donna Maria. What to think of a passage like: “What’s in a name like Strozzolone/Afraid for his life and home/Makes him feel so alone”? Indeed, the film would have benefitted from dropping these altogether and keeping the action confined to the Neapolitan characters in Naples. And while the Neapolitan words to the songs are frequently clever and/or beautiful, especially in their use of slant rhymes, the English-language lyrics, co-written by Mark Hanna, are also nothing to write home about. The tourists are never seen before or after their single sequence so they don’t add anything to the main story, while the New York subplot is a painful interlude with bad English-language dialogue. There are two English-language songs, for example, one sung by a group of tourists who get robbed in the “Gomorrah ’hood,” which they - supposedly ironically - praise as the “ultimate touristic experience,” and the other in New York, where family members of the rivaling factions live. Both songs also benefit from smart staging, placing the actors in the thick of the action.īut there are a few too many detours that aren’t really necessary and end up slowing down especially the second half of the film. These songs go right to the heart of the material and, since Rossi is as good a singer as she is an actress, these tunes really pop. She’s handcuffed to Ciro, who literally mows down one bad guy after the other while she belts out a song about how he avoids his feelings like he avoid bullets. The film’s other musical highlight, an original song called “Bang Bang,” was written by Pivio and Aldo de Scalzi and is also sung by Fatima. ![]() Choosing Fatima over Vincenzo and a life of riches, however, comes at a price, and the rest of the film Ciro has to fight off Vincenzo’s small army of allies, from his former buddy Rosario to various other unsavory-looking types, who all want to avenge their (now supposedly dead) boss.Īs the title suggests, this is, at its heart, a love story set against the backdrop of (organized) crime. ![]() There’s only a tiny inconvenience: Fatima and Ciro, who has come to kill her, used to be childhood sweethearts, as revealed in the film’s first show-stopper, a reworking of the song “ Flashdance… What a Feeling” in Neapolitan, which is sung by Fatima and which reveals their shared backstory, cutesy flashbacks and all (the original music of this song was written by Italian Giorgio Moroder and the new lyrics are by the film’s songwriter, Alessandro Nelson Garofalo aka Nelson).
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