The film tells the story of the Michelucci family, from the nineteen-seventies to the present day: the central character is the stunningly beautiful Anna, the lively, frivolous and sometimes embarrassing mother of Bruno and Valeria. Everything begins in the Summer of 1971, at the annual Summer beauty pageant held at Livorno’s most popular bathing establishment. Anna is unexpectedly crowned “Most Beautiful Mother”, unwittingly stirring the violent jealousy of her husband. From then on, chaos strikes the family and for Anna, Bruno and his sister Valeria, it is the start of an adventure that will only end thirty years later.
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Having gone through most of Virzi's movies, I thought I was about to see a nice and elegant comedy as previously seen in "My name is Tanino" or "Caterina goes to the city". Instead, the film is drama lacking any type of perspective beyond the elementary and stereotyped Italian postcard of a '70s middle-class family. Characters are so much stereotyped that by the end of the movie I was feeling nosed. The plot is poor and predictable, and apart from the second husband, the other actors are simply unfitted. I'm afraid that Virzi wanted to assert new directing ambitions, but that these have finished to be widely disappointing. 3 for the effort, but subject, plot, direction and acting are a mess to a point that we ended up laughing at the scene of the mother's death.
Most people agree that the Golden Age of Italian movies started with Rosselini's "Rome-Open City" and ended about 15 years before Mastroianni's death. What's the cause of that, we can't be sure of.This film about the drug depending teacher, who remembers his mother during the last decade of that era and how she involuntarily destroyed the lives of him and his sister. They really haven't begun yet. His mother another example of the common Italian film theme "Too beautiful for her own good".But that theme would have been done better in the hands of the golden Italian directors and good acting really don't make that much difference here.
Although the golden age of Italian cinema probably stopped a couple of decades ago after a formidable run beginning with the neo-realist movement, Paolo Virzi's The First Beautiful Thing captures some of the realism and confusion of life in the 1970's through present day. Propelled by several sometimes confusing flashbacks, it still makes sense when it focuses on mother and son and a tempestuous, oedipal string of lasting impressions.Anna (Michella Ramazzotti) is a beautiful mother, wife, and local hottie who wins the Summer Mother Beauty Contest of 1971, setting off a series of jealousies (even her young son), and infidelities, as befitting the not quite stereotypical mother/whore motif. Son Bruno, played as an adult by Valerio Mastanrea, grows up to be a professor and a misanthropist whose recurring images of his chaotic mother disturb him and alienate him from his sister Valeria (Claudia Pandolfi) and his mother, played in her later years by Stephania Sandrelli.Bruno is more memorable than his mother because he is far more complicated, a drug addict who struggles to please his cancerous mother in her last days and reconcile with his sister. While Bruno's oedipal inclinations have not been overpowering, mother Anna has a couple of scenes where she treats him like a lover rather than a son. Regardless of those clues, it is not until they are permanently separated that he is free to swim with his girlfriend, seemingly washed of his mother and free to love.Compare this mother/whore story with the recent much more oblique I am Love or the more openly incestuous Murmur of the Heart, and you can see why it comes closer to telenovela than a classic, The Priest's Wife, in which Sophia Loren challenges a priest's vow of celibacy. Anna wrecks her children's lives, according to her son, but she has an aura of likability that begs the audience to care for her when she has mostly confused the lives of many men and children, too.Although the story lacks sophisticated dialogue and the plot is unnecessarily complex, the film is a moving treatise on the effects of absent mothers and estranged sons on family happiness.
A beautiful and touching movie. The actors are really good - Pandolfi and Mastandrea deliver probably their best performance ever, while the common effort of Stefania Sandrelli and Micaela Rammazzotti depicts a wonderful, unforgettable female lead character, that somehow accomplish the not so easy task of being at the same time down-to-earth and larger-than-life. The story is full of grief and pain, and thanks to the overall great acting performance, those feelings seem so real that they will make you suffer (and cry). At the same time, anyway, the script is full of funny moments that will make you laugh, and laughs will wash away the tears – you know, just like in the real life. Strongly recommended to anybody.
