Il materiale emotivo

Please, don't assume you're gifted in any way. The only gift some might like to receive from this movie has to do with M De Angelis; and still here she shows nothing that she hasn't already shown in "The Undoing".

Writer-Director E. Scola who depicted with his 50yo career a lot of the italian esprit before dying recently, wrote the story - which became a comic - going way out of his depth IMO. Someone thought it was worth a movie with Castellitto starring-directing and that's it.

I just recently reviewed another disaster of a movie: "La mecanica popular" which deals with art, fiction, literature, etc just like this "Il Materiale Emotivo". I shoud have guessed... Ofc all the emotional material I found were my desperate disappointment for the mediocre prosaic mummified nothingness I witnessed. Luckily here the quantity of pretentious and meaningless shouted lines is lower, and yet... it doesn't make any difference: why people produce these things? Why not spending a couple of nights for an innocent poem (or a comic) no one will read, and instead polluting the world with these costly, vacuous, artificial, unfunny, anachronistic and brainless allegories?

Let's add that the dubbing of B. Bejo is abysmal. I still don't get why you pick foreign actors if they can't speak the film scripted language... Foreign producers wanted their actors in as well? Well... get a bad review.

Much like Orson Welles and others, this is a film by a long dead auteur finished and released long after his passing.

And whilst Ettore Scola didn't personally direct this beyond writing the script long ago, his touch is very much found here.

It is a very small scale story with a limited number of sets and players, and it excells at what it sets out to do. The writing manages to be both funny yet very emotional and deep. The actors all give it their all and do an amazing job.

The cinematography and editing feels very much in line with Scola, and I'm sure he would be very proud.

It is always interesting with these kinds of projects and how even the original director's death doesn't stop the show fully.

I would recommend this for any fan of Ettore Scola!