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August 4 - August 11,2002 |
A Last Kiss worth millions
Gabriele Muccino's L'ultimo bacio defies Italian convention in moviemaking
By Angela Baldassarre
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Gabriele Muccino is one of Italy’s most sought-after filmmakers
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Although we're not much aware of them on this side of the Atlantic, over the past few years a new generation of Italian filmmakers has begun to emerge. Unlike their more famous predecessors, these young directors are defined by neither a political position nor an aesthetic approach, but are more unified by a new spirit of independence, of breaking away from old models and genres.
The most successful of these is without question Gabriele Muccino, the 35-year-old Roman filmmaker whose third film, The Last Kiss (L'ultimo bacio), has become one of Italy's greatest box-office successes.
A gem of a film about relationships at a crisis point, The Last Kiss centres on Giulia (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and Carlo (Stefano Accorsi) who have been happily living together for three years; when Giulia discovers she is pregnant, she is ecstatic, but Carlo panics. The news also impacts on Giulia's mother Anna (Stefania Sandrelli), who after 29 years of marriage, suddenly realizes she will be a grandmother and laments that her youth has slipped away. When Carlo meets beautiful 18-year-old schoolgirl Francesca (Martina Stella), he is captivated and pursues her for one last fling. In the meantime, his buddies are having a crisis of their own. Think Magnolia meets American Beauty.
Muccino, who is currently shooting Ricordati di Me starring Monica Bellucci and Laura Morante in Rome, talked to Tandem about The Last Kiss.
The film is about modern-day relationships.
"It's a film that has as its major theme the structural incapacity to grow up. It's the story of three couples, young men and women in their thirties. The central relationship is that of Carlo and Giulia who are expecting a child. He becomes uneasy about the relationship, about a life that is, let's say, completed. Consequently, nervously and restlessly, he finds an alternative to this route. Then there's the story of his friend, Adriano, who has a child but who also experiences a veritable collapse in his relationship. There's also the story of Giulia's mother, a 50-year-old woman who has the same fear as that of her son-in-law's. In her case it's not so much the fear of growing up, but the fear of ageing. These tales of restlessness criss-cross each other continuously in the film, and finally lead towards a happy ending, even one of spiritual serenity. It's this movement that follows all of the film's characters. And there are many of them. I call it a 'choral' film in which there are eight characters and all of whom experience an anarchic explosion towards a something, which is revealed as both anarchic and confusing."
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