Pull out your PDAs. See what you can shift on your schedule.
Because today director Marco Tullio Giordana’s “The Best of Youth” – a two-part, six-hour family saga – begins a two-week run at the Starz FilmCenter.
If you can commit to one day of rump-numbing viewing, do. If you can’t, Starz has made it easy to take this ride of joy and melancholy, yearning and misunderstanding, quiet ruin and sweet reconciliation.
The Caratis’ tale begins in the summer of 1966 as brothers Nicola and Matteo study for college exams. “Part 2” ends nearly 30 years later, with a kind of symmetry that can be so satisfying in literature.
Indeed, “The Best of Youth” unfolds like a novel full of characters we can’t help but care about. This fondness results from a gifted ensemble, beginning with Alessio Boni. As Matteo – the Carati’s eldest son – Boni captures his character’s oscillation between hard and soft. He is the moody artist who becomes a moodier cop.
On the day he and Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) are set to begin a larky adventure with friends Carlo (Fabrizio Gifuni) and Berto, Matteo shows up with a strange woman.
In a grand dive into compassion, Matteo rescued Giorgia, a young woman from a mental hospital.
It doesn’t take long for this gallant gesture to go awry. And when Nicola and Matteo part ways, unhappily, the younger brother heads to Norway.
Matteo joins the army.
They meet again in Florence during the disastrous flood of November 1966.
“The Best of Youth” is rife with this sort of unlikely coincidence. It doesn’t matter.
Nicola meets Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco) in Florence. They become lovers, later the parents of Sara. Still later, Giulia becomes a membor of the notorious Red Brigade – then a fugitive – at the same time Matteo has become a member of a task force meant to hunt the radicals down.
There is a danger in using characters to articulate historical moments: The themes become less extraordinary, and the characters become straw figures. Yet the Caratis trials and tribulations are woven into the fabric of Italy’s.
“The Best of Youth” invites comparisons to other films – from “La Dolce Vita” to “Rocco and His Brothers,” even Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” trilogy. None of them quite fit.
As beautiful as it is, “Best of Youth” isn’t as groundbreaking as any of those films. Yet it delivers in its biography of a family an intimate portrait of a nation.
Anyone aware of the global history of the 1960s knows that the decade was just as rough and beautifully optimistic in other parts of the world as it was in the U.S.
It is a fool’s errand to recount the plot of a six-hour film that takes you through 30 years of history. Director Giordana and screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli spin tales that deserve to be discovered without too much revelation here.
Not knowing where the characters are headed any better than they do isn’t just the product of truthful writing. It is also proof that a six-hour movie hasn’t simply taken steroids.
Nearly 8 miles of film unspool during the “The Best of Youth.” What amazes is that each step in the Caratis’ journey is well worth it.
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“The Best of Youth: Part 1 & 2”
***½
R for language and brief nudity|Each part 3 hours, 3 minutes|FAMILY SAGA| Directed by Marco Tullio Giordana; written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli; photography by Roberto Forza; starring Luigi Lo Cascio, Adriana Asti, Alessio Boni, Fabrizio Gifuni, Sonia Bergamasco, Jasmine Trinca, Maya Sansa |Opens today for a two-week run at the Starz FilmCenter.
