A Summer in Genoa

This is one of those films the British Lottery Fund wastes its money on. The main problem is a rambling script which gets nowhere. The characters are not interesting, the story is conventional and insipid, the only thing of interest is the location: the city of Genoa (Genova in Italian). Having only a superficial acquaintance with Genoa, I had no idea of the intricate alleyways of its Old Town, and that the city was so interesting. I had thought Genoa was dull. I am delighted to say that I have been proved wrong. So from the travelogue point of view, this film has interest. The film contains one splendid performance, by a little girl named Perla Haney-Jardine. She has already made seven films despite being only 12, so she seems determined upon a career as an actress, and judging by her performance in this film, she should go far, as she is a natural and has a great deal of talent. Colin Firth, a reliable and professional actor, was on hand for the filming and when asked to be earnest, he was earnest, and when asked to be anguished, he was anguished. But somebody forgot to give him any worthwhile dialogue. The script is a total shambles. Catherine Keener does exceptionally well in a supporting role, and showing sympathy comes naturally to her, so that everybody would like to have her around (I would like to tell her every time I feel a cold coming on, as I know she would get me a soothing hot drink). So there we have it: Genoa's fascinating narrow alleys, an interesting little girl, and a sympathetic woman. Forget the rest. The older sister played by Willa Holland is such a disgusting character that the fact that the young actress does a good job of being repellent is not exactly the kind of acting tribute she would like to hear, I suspect. The notion that this family go off to Genoa to forget the unfortunate death of the mother is so trite that if we have another film like that, all dead mothers have a right to complain at being exploited. If Michael Winterbottom wanted to make a film about how interesting the old portion of Genoa is, why didn't he just go to the BBC and say he wanted to make a travel film with some mindless celebrity presenter? Why waste money on a feature film which is nothing but a vanity project of idle and meandering vacuity?

Marianne (Hope Davis) dies in a car crash with her daughters in the back. The youngest Mary causes the crash. Joe (Colin Firth) goes to teach English Literature at the University in Genova, Italy and brings his daughters Mary and Kelly (Willa Holland) over for the summer. Mary is racked with guilt and Kelly falls in love with a local boy. Joe is struggling to move on with college Barbara (Catherine Keener).

The movie is dealing with some heavy issues. The problem is that these people are trying to avoid the issues. It doesn't make for great intensity. I wish Mary and Kelly have some better conversation. This is basically a foreign vacation with some dark undertones beneath it. The most compelling parts are a couple things with Mary. Kelly isn't doing anything outrageous that the audience can attribute to more than simple teenage rebellion. It's OK to have the characters avoid the subject matter but they have to go off on other tangents to get the intensity.

I was taken by the melancholy and the beauty of the film and if this wasn't enough, Colin Firth's performance! His best since "Apartment Zero" and that is saying something. Not a single false move in a film that could very easily become a simple tearjerker. Colin as a dad who takes care of his young daughters after the tragic death of his wife is simply extraordinary. The humanity of his character, flaws and all, is immediately recognisable. The film is filled with an emotional form of suspense that makes the experience utterly unnerving at times. Genova, the city, is photographed with real gusto. The narrow "vicoli" create a sense of dislocation that underlines in the most poetic way the new roads that Colin and his daughters are, not merely finding, but forging for themselves. A delightful surprise.

In some ways A Summer in Genoa was fairly like Grace is Gone which starred John Cusack as a father who together with his two children have to figure out life after the death of his wife. Here, Colin Firth plays the role of dad, who decided to uproot his family of daughters Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) and Kelly (Willa Holland) from Chicago to Genoa in order to start their lives anew, which gives rise to plenty of touristy moments as they settle down in a new environment and get to learn a little bit about the culture of the Italians before they assimilate right in, not that we get to learn a lot anyway.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, this film presented what would be a one month snapshot of the lives of three characters each affected quite differently with the passing of a loved one. Made even more poignant is that one of them was directly responsible for the death in the family, in an opening scene that you are probably going to cringe with cinematic premonition that something untoward would happen, since there were plenty of visual and aural clues on how it would all eventually pan out. But the snapshot presented was really slight in nature, having its characters fall into stereotypes, while the narrative shifts gear into the morose and flatlines almost throughout its entire run time.

Colin Firth could play Joe with his eyes closed, being the dad whose new stint in a school brings him attention in the form of female students, as well as a friend from the past (Catherine Keener) who had helped him and his family in their initial settling down, providing that potential romantic interest that didn't develop much. The most Joe had to do is to appease youngest daughter Mary, the baby of the family, who suffers from constant nightmares about that fateful night with her mom.

Willa Holland as the teenage daughter Kelly expectedly falls into the rebellious phase as she lusts after the attention showered unto her from many hot blooded Italian men, with the usual flings you'd come to expect from a title like that. The only depth to her character comes from the very testy relationship formed with her younger sister, where in front of their father she plays the angel, but in his absence becomes the bully not pulling her weight in the discharge of her responsibilities.

Perla Haney-Jardine though probably was the star of the show, stealing the thunder from everyone with her performance that requires to showcase a range of emotions, and by and large her character here may have resembled the little kid in Millions who possessed a vivid imagination. Hope Davis enjoyed limited screen time in the film, but her scenes opposite Hope Davis were probably the best in the storyline that required to tread upon the supernatural, though more Casper than creepy, personifying how one grasps onto treasured memories with the reluctance to let go.

Don't expect any major breakthroughs or moments with deeper meanings, though it had one harrowing scene that reminded me of how horrible traffic in Italy could be, and their scooters that weave in and out of small lanes, where a map is probably useless since the streets have no signages. It certainly brought back some of my own wonderful experience in the country, that the most this film had done, is to rekindle that interest to go travelling and tour more Italian towns.

When I first heard about this movie I got very excited: it doesn't happen every day to have a little city like Genova featuring in an international production, and, as a resident of this very city, I felt the right to boast a slight sense of revenge against other, more celebrated, Italian cities (to put things in perspective, Genova is often overlooked by Italian medias and by the powers that be, despite having the second biggest and busiest harbour in Europe). This until I actually managed to watch the movie. Just to avoid this post to become an unmitigated rant, I have to say that the movie itself it's not half bad...but when you name your work after a city, you're at least expected to have a faint grasp on what the whole place is about. Instead we get a trite bunch of clichés about Italy: tanned guys teasing young girls while zooming along on mopeds - people here, both old and young,barely acknowledge your presence until you bump into them - ...then the same guys roaming through the city in a huge, motorcycle-mounted pack... - never seen anything like that -...and then a little bit more of the same guys goofing on the beach... It looks like the director had spent three months in Rome or Naples before he decided to have a slightly left field take on it and to choose a less renowned city as a setting for his work, maybe to appeal to the more "indie"-oriented part of the audience. Pity he didn't manage to get anything out of the place's soul: some really awful Italians B-movies from the 70s give you a fairer rendition of the city than this movie could ever dream of. Anyway, I wouldn't be so riled about that if it wasn't for the director waxing lyrical, in interviews with local newspapers, about how much he loved the city and how he succeeded in transposing its heart and soul on the screen. Again, not a bad a film, but you could have it called with any generic Mediterranean city name and nobody would notice!