It's 1969 in Palermo, Italy. Our hero is Arturo (Alex Bisconti as a child; writer-director Pierfrancesco Dilberto as an adult), an aspiring journalist with his heart set firmly on his beautiful classmate Flora (Ginevra Antona as a child; Claudia Gioe as an adult). His awkward efforts to woo Flora happen simultaneously with the rise of the Cosa Nostra, or the Silician Mafia, and his and the rest of Palermo's dawning awareness of them over the next two decades.
This Italian critical darling began really so well for me, with its unusual but genuinely charming mix of The Wonder Years, Amelie, Goodfellas and Good Bye, Lenin!. The first half with child Arturo mixes the respective nostalgia and narration, romantic whimsy, mafia theme and political subtext of those four classics. But then it jumps forward to adult Arturu now working as a journalist and still in love with Flora, and I can understand and appreciate how that creative choice was taken for a narrative arc and variety but that's where the film's consistency really dropped for me. The childhood scenes are sweeter than a gelato (and you know I've made that reference because this is an Italian movie) and the adulthood ones, in fairness, abandon that for realism to show the contrasts between those life stages, but I just found the transition quite jarring and the outcome increasingly bland. I think Dilberto should've added some subtle visual or thematic connections in the latter scenes to the events in Arturo's and Flora's childhoods. Not to mention more emphasis in the cinematography, particularly, on the Mediterranean landscape nearby, and in a few scenes Roberto Forza's score I found rather intrusive.
This Italian critical darling began really so well for me, with its unusual but genuinely charming mix of The Wonder Years, Amelie, Goodfellas and Good Bye, Lenin!. The first half with child Arturo mixes the respective nostalgia and narration, romantic whimsy, mafia theme and political subtext of those four classics. But then it jumps forward to adult Arturu now working as a journalist and still in love with Flora, and I can understand and appreciate how that creative choice was taken for a narrative arc and variety but that's where the film's consistency really dropped for me. The childhood scenes are sweeter than a gelato (and you know I've made that reference because this is an Italian movie) and the adulthood ones, in fairness, abandon that for realism to show the contrasts between those life stages, but I just found the transition quite jarring and the outcome increasingly bland. I think Dilberto should've added some subtle visual or thematic connections in the latter scenes to the events in Arturo's and Flora's childhoods. Not to mention more emphasis in the cinematography, particularly, on the Mediterranean landscape nearby, and in a few scenes Roberto Forza's score I found rather intrusive.
The cast, particularly the child ones, are delightful on-screen, too, but The Mafia Kills Only in Summer really ended up taking the wrong stylistic route for me. I give it 6/10. However, it won Best Comedy Film at the 2013 European Film Awards, former anti-Mafia magistrate Pietro Grasso called it the best film ever made about the Sicilian Mafia and it spawned an Italian TV series, so what do I know?
No comments:
Post a Comment