I saw this film last night at the Italian Film Festival in LA and was deeply disappointed. I'm a huge fan of bleak, minimalist cinema and in theory, this movie, with its hand-held aesthetic, promise of exploring neo-fascism in modern Italy, and dark yet humanist subject matter seemed right up my alley. Turns out I was wrong.
Let's start positively, the cinematography is good, especially a gorgeous scene where the lead kid takes a long walk with a wheelbarrow, but everything else about this movie is so over-the-top, so cheesy and manipulative, so thematically scattered, that it was all I could do not to leave the theater and immediately go watch something else to cleanse my pallet.
Especially heavy-handed are the music cues. Oh my god... unbelievable. Every time the music dropped it was with for such obvious, manipulative purposes that I died a little inside. And I guess the movie's constant references to God and his intent on this earth are supposed to resonate on a deep thematic level, but they don't. It's just more overused trite masquerading as meaning in a film lost in its own pretensions.
I really do enjoy this KIND of movie. But this is a terrible example of it.
