Director: Gabriele Muccino
Starring: Steffano Accorsi, Vittoria Puccini, Sara Girolami, Marco Cocci, and Pierfrancesco Favino
Distributor: Independent
Runtime: 145 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011

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Rating notes: Strong sex scenes

The movie chooses different ways of conveying a variety of moral messages about human fragility and weakness. There is comic handling of the goings-on of Italian males, providing wry social comment on Italian masculinity, dramatic playing-out of the impact of mental illness on Carlo and his friends, and heavy doses of sugar-encrusted melodrama threading through. Nearly all of the women in the movie are unhappy in their current relationships with men. They accept their interactions at a superficial level, but all of them believe their relationships should be much better, if ever they are to find true happiness.

In many ways, this is a movie about discontent and latent unhappiness on multiple fronts, and the characters in the film are flawed by their own vulnerability. Muccino shows a confident hand, but it is unlikely that his second look at the diversity of humanity will be as popular as what he created in his original film, which was highly successful in Italy, and other countries. Even though this film swept the awards at Shanghai’s International Film Festival in 2010, the problem is that a second look at the same people reveals similar flaws of character as the first film, and it is not entirely clear that this movie, ten years on, has made a real difference to their lives, their morality, or their philosophies of life. Carlo still has familiar anxieties about his life, and his friends still grapple with major responsibilities. In the first movie, most of the characters struggled with their lives, and in this film they continue to struggle. Closure at the end of the film is superficial. A suicide within their own group by the mentally-ill lover of Alberto’s ex-wife brings them all together to find happiness, wherever and whenever they can, but one senses that an opportunity for showing genuine closure in the characters’ lives has been lost.

If one can lay aside the revisiting of old issues, and the fact that the film is over-long in its telling, this is a movie that is nevertheless directed in typical European style, and it is involving. The acting is uniformly very good, and Muccino shows finesse in dramatising human weaknesses. The film, may at times look a little like “Peyton Place at the age of 40”, or “Sex and the City for Males”, but the canvass Muccino weaves of individuals trying to cope is still worth watching, even if the morality of his characters’ behaviour is very suspect. But in the final run, you know that not a great deal has changed in these people’s approach to their lives, the second time around.