THE BEST OF YOUTH (PART 1 & 2)
Winner "Un Certain Regard"
Cannes International Film Festival 2003
An epic film brings with it certain pleasures not afforded by the two-hour running time that is the conventional standard. It may seem daunting, or a challenge some will not want to confront, but those who do will be rewarded by what many consider the finest Italian film of the year. The Best of Youth simultaneously tells the story of a family while recounting the events of the last forty years of Italian history. The film contemplates how people change, grow apart, come together and interact with political and social forces all those things that shape almost four decades of living.
The family is the Caratis: father, mother, their two sons and two daughters. The year is 1966, the setting Rome. It is apparent the two teenaged sons are polar opposites Nicola, calm and sensitive; Matteo, the wild one, impulsive and tempestuous. Over the course of the next thirty years, the two men go their separate ways: Nicola becomes a psychiatrist, while Matteo joins the military and ends up a police officer. One marries, the other moves through a succession of deep but troubled relationships. It is when Nicola's wife, the strong-minded Giulia, finds solace in the extreme rhetoric of the Red Brigades that events turn in a startling direction.
Early in the film, one of Nicola's professors tells him that if he is ambitious, he should leave: "Italy is a dying, useless country." This thought hangs ominously over the fates of the two brothers and their sisters - one a judge, the other a housewife - through the rest of the film. Marriages, love affairs, child-rearing and death are set against specific events in Italian history - evocative moments such as the Florence floods of 1966 and the 1982 World Cup.
For comparison, one might look to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy, or Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, two extraordinary stories about the rise and fall of families. But The Best of Youth is, finally, in a league of its own. It is a unique, mesmerizing film about the fortunes of an ordinary family caught up in extraordinary events.
Piers Handling, Toronto Film Festival
Directed by Marco Tullio Giordana
Starring Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessio Boni, Adriana Asti
Epic / 2003 / Part 1 (182mins) & Part 2 (176mins)