In Italy the movie critics did not express good comments on Gabriele Muccino's last film Baciami ancora. The reasons are obvious. Many politicized critics did not forgive the director's "American treason", in the pursuit of commercial happiness and of overemphasized philanthropy. Other critics, factious as well, never appreciated Muccino's movies in the name of an assumed distortion of "true" reality. Apart from the theoretical and metaphysical concept of realism in motion pictures, Muccino is extremely, extraordinarily smart, brave, capable in representing the reality he personally lives and in describing his own surrounding "human comedy". The director has always been thoroughly coherent in stating that he could focus on his autobiographical observations, which indeed regard the middle and upper class, constituted by a group of friends belonging to the high-ranking Roman society. He never tried and dared to be so pretentious and ambitious to represent the overall social reality. Even so, the factious critics could not accept Muccino's atypical style, so distant and dissimilar from the two classic "monoliths" of the Italian movie: the Italian comedy and the historical and social-based films. As in the two previous movies produced in Italy, L'ultimo bacio and Ricordati di me, Muccino also in Baciami ancora demonstrates to be a deep, poetical, lyric, psychoanalytic observer and narrator of the extreme, more profound human emotions. In the previous movies he described the conflicts between and among the parental and the new generations with an impressive, touching ability. He could be deemed by that time, and all the more reason now can be considered the only interpreter, at least in Italy, of the current, present, real times, with all the contradictions, emotional surges, unstable moods, anxieties, fervours, yearnings of the daily life. In his last movie, the director describes "that" reality ten years after. The protagonists did not lose their "pathos", but seem to be broken up, more disenchanted, inescapably more involved in their own microcosm, in their more or less eventful, rewarding family lives. Still, the most typical character in Muccino's movies is somebody constantly looking for an impossible perfection, longing for a lost paradise, always struggling for an utopian, visionary happiness, in the eternal, inevitable, fatal dualism between Eros and Thanatos. According to most critics, the history of movies has changed after the revolutionary milestone represented by Avatar, the all time most successful film ever produced. A new era has ushered in, with new, digital, prodigious, fantastic, three-dimension astonishing effects, that are going to necessarily affect and change the future. It may be true. However, in this miraculous, incredible, multidimensional representation, the only pure essence, core of the movie remains just one: the one-dimensional ascent of the soul.
