Gli anni più belli (2020)

Directed by: Gabriele Muccino | 129 minutes | drama | Actors: Pierfrancesco Favino, Micaela Ramazzotti, Kim Rossi Stuart, Claudio Santamaria, Nicoletta Romanoff, Emma Marrone, Alma Noce, Francesco Centorame, Andrea Pittorino, Matteo De Buono, Mariano Rigillo, Francesco Acquaroli, Paola Sotgiu, Fabrizio Nardi, Gennaro Apicella Visari, Ilan Muccino, Massimiliano Cardia, Titti Nuzzolese, Matteo de Buono, Azzurra Rocchi, Matteo Zanotti

What are the best years of your life? So many people, so many opinions. Childhood (usually) offers carefreeness; puberty new experiences and the feeling that all options are open; adults enjoy (financial) freedom and independence and retirees can organize their days as they please, provided their health permits. It’s a strange statement actually, because who decides what your best years are? Perhaps that is the message of the Italian drama ‘Gli anni più belli’: that you should try to make something beautiful out of every day.

‘Gli anni più belli’ starts in the eighties. A disco, roller skating. Teens dancing together to Imagination’s Just an Illusion. Then one of them is taken outside by the other, because ‘they set cars on fire!’ The boys, Giulio and Paolo, find themselves in a heated civil uprising that the Italian riot police makes short work of. A third boy, Riccardo, hitherto unknown to the two friends, gets a bullet in the stomach and thanks to the teens’ resolute action he survives. From then on, the three boys are together almost every moment. The quartet is complete when blonde Gemma joins them. She and Paolo fall in love, but death throws a spanner in the works and their ways part – for a moment.

Gabriele Muccino doesn’t dwell on the teenage years for long, as he still has about an hour and a half to go before thirty years. We follow the woman and the three men in the early years of their careers, after the first setbacks and see how they lose sight of each other and find each other again. ‘Gli anni più belli’ looks like a soap opera, with some world events in the background (the fall of the wall, 9/11), which only feel as if they were added to give the film some context, rather than these scenes actually carry weight.

The film looks like something to pass through, the sun casts a warm glow over the beautiful (character) actors, but it is still difficult to empathize with them. Because the director hops so much from high to low, we only get to see the actors in ecstatic joy or pathetic states. In addition, the protagonists as omniscient narrators regularly break the fourth wall and that irritates. Yes, they are human: they make wrong decisions, but they also do good. The idealist turns out to be a cheater but also an excellent father; the unsuccessful creative person turns out to be the glue of the group and the orphan can’t make lasting choices until life catches up. Everyone will find something recognizable in the plot or the characters, but this summery, epic Italian film does not touch, but rages like a tornado through the clichéd lives of the four.