THE LAST KISS (L'Ultimo bacio)
Rating out of 4 stars:3 Reviewed by Harvey Karten ThinkFilm Director: Gabriele Muccino Writer: Gabriele Muccino Cast: Stefano Accorsi, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Martina Stella Screened at: Preview 9, NYC, 4/30/02
"The Last Kiss" could have been entitled "What's It All About, Alfie, Italian Style, " dealing as it does with The Meaning of Life, which is, according to writer-director Gabriele Muccino, "to find meaning in life." Here is a philosophic insight that transcends the usual response to "What's the most important thing in life?" "Happiness," since the frantically partying young people in the story look happy, they are happy for the moment, but something is missing. They have not found meaning in their existence.
Of course there is no One Meaning to life; each person must find his or her own. For some it just may be partying. For others it's raising a family, remaining faithful. Then again, as Muccino seems to say, those who party like mad seem to want stability and those who are stolidly familied want out. Woody Allen always said that when he's here, he wants to be there and when he's there he wants to be here. That pretty much sums up these looney characters.
The film, lensed brightly by Marcello Montarsi with a relatively unobtrusive and appropriate music background that ranges from Peter Tchaikowsky's "Pathetique" (oops, pardon me, "La Patetica" by Pietr II'ic Caijkovskij) to I Piu Bestial che Blues' "What Love Can Do," is not just swiftly paced. It's frantic. The characters pop onto the screen, talk swiftly, and disappear so quickly that we in the audience could be as breathless as they are. At the center of the tale of eight people whose lives energetically intertwine like the folks in a comic opera is Carlo (Stefano Accorsi), who is approaching the age of 30, scared, afraid to commit to his now pregnant and beautiful girlfriend Giulia (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), and envious of his young friends who are about to traipse across Africa in a cheap van. Some of the would-be travelers especially Adriano (Giorgio Pasotti) are envious (wouldn't you know) of the guy they think has a stable family life ahead of him. Woody Allen syndrome rears its head repeatedly in this delightful roundelay of intense people who are frightened that the passion is seeping out of their lives as it already has for about-to-be-grandma Anna (Strefania Sandrelli), who is Giulia's mom.
Age is no barrier to thoughts of wanderlust as even thos 50- year-old Anna, tired of the silent treatment from her well-off psychiatrist husband, considers fleeing the nest with a younger and more attentive man with whom she had a fleeting affair some years earlier.
In his production notes, writer-director Muccino is concerned about the breakdown of marriage in contemporary society, the fact that fewer people are tying the knot today that in most previous generations, and those who do jump the broomstick are breaking up without much thought. As his movie brings out through his agitated characters, we are not only chasing after youth (maybe like Faust, who no longer gives a fig that he's a famous, albeit dried-out scholar and wants to be young again?): we want lives of endless passion and this simply does not exist. What makes "L' Ultimo bacio a bracing work is that its high- comedy genre is the very way by which moments of deep poignance are evoked. The acting is uniformly high-spirited and sincere: take special note of the drop-dead gorgeous Martina Stella in the role of the eighteen-year-old high-school kid, Francesca, who has a powerful crush on our anti-hero Carlo.
Not Rated. Running time: 114 minutes. (C) 2002 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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