La prima cosa bella (2010)

Directed by: Paolo Virzì | 122 minutes | drama, comedy | Actors: Valerio Mastandrea, Micaela Ramazzotti, Stefania Sandrelli, Claudia Pandolfi, Marco Messeri, Fabrizia Sacchi, Aurora Frasca, Giacomo Bibbiani, Giulia Burgalassi, Francesco Rapalino, Sergio Albelli, Isabella Cecchi, Emanuele Barresi, Dario Ruffantini

In what is now Milan, we meet Bruno, a gloomy forties, who, despite an apparently balanced life – including job and dear girlfriend – cannot manage to be happy. In lost hours, he illegally buys drugs in the park to suppress his depressive feelings. When his younger sister Valeria suddenly comes by, he doesn’t want to hear from her. Then their mother turns out to have a terminal form of cancer and Valeria can persuade Bruno to go to their hometown of Livorno. There awaits the still beautiful Anna, on her deathbed, and with her the many memories of their youth. They take us to the beautiful seventies, and then to Italy, where the women were even more beautiful and the men even tougher than elsewhere. Where the old-fashioned machismo was still omnipresent but the free seventies mentality was lurking. There, the free-spirited Anna and her two young children decided to leave her jealous husband for an insecure but freer life. The images gradually show that this mainly resulted in a lot of resentment and uncertainty for the children – for Bruno more than his sister who was still too young.

The homely settings of the film, full of grumpy men, chatty women, latent frustrations, tensions, curious teenagers and mutual conflicts have a wonderfully Italian feel. Every Italian director owes some kind of debt to the classics of Fellini and co., or at least thinks about them for a moment, just as the viewer will. As a result, the images often seem pleasantly familiar, and yet director Paolo Virzì manages to give his film a face of its own. Virzì, himself born in Livorno, also shows with the film a look back for all children who were young in the seventies, children of parents who wanted to develop their own happiness in life at all costs. ‘La prima cosa bella’ subtly depicts the fact that many children have been severely beaten by this, without destroying the searches of neither parent nor child.

The Livorno of the seventies is of course an eminent embodiment of old-fashioned Italy, where a woman must above all be a good wife and mother, while meanwhile the blistering beauty of a woman like Anna leaves no man untouched. In this intricate machismo and cautious feminism, it’s hard to tell who should be pointed the finger of blame. The free-spirited woman who trades a matrimonial prison for an insecure life full of lovers who already don’t treat her much better than her jealous husband did? The jealous husband who won’t share his wife? The resentful son who thinks he has ruined his life at the hands of his mother? The adulterous men who have very different standards indoors and out? Obviously the guys in the movie don’t fare too well, and yet Virzì doesn’t make them bad guys. The women – provided they can find a balance in emancipation without selfishness, zest for life with responsibilities – do considerably better in Virzì’s world, which may thus allude to present-day – or future – Italy.

‘La prima cosa bella’ refers to a sweet song that Anna sings before going to sleep to her children, who cannot resist the temptation and let themselves be carried away in the moving world of their mother. This is exactly what will happen to the viewer when he sees ‘La prima cosa bella’.