Life unfolds gently, wrenchingly in family saga
"Everything is truly beautiful," says one character to another toward the end of Marco Tullio Giordana's marvelously satisfying six-hour epic, "The Best of Youth," and it's one of this film's many gifts to its audience that we believe it, wholeheartedly.
You leave the theater after the end of Part 2 dazzled, happy, reluctant to return to our own world after glimpsing the beauty and richness of Giordana's.
Viewing "The Best of Youth" is an emotional experience and a rare pleasure. It never feels long; in fact, you won't want it to end. I'd happily sit through Part 3, which I hope Giordana will make someday.
Though the film is beautifully crafted and acted, part of the reason for its appeal is simply the luxury of time. We spend six hours with its characters, rather than cinema's usual two; investing more of our lives and becoming more invested in theirs — it's like reading a fully populated, leisurely novel, rather than a short story.
(No one need fear that "The Best of Youth" — originally made for Italian television — will inspire less-gifted filmmakers to come up with six-hour epics; studio heads and theater economics won't stand for it, and it's a near-miracle that "The Best of Youth" is opening in U.S. theaters at all. Despite the rapt reception it has received from film-festival audiences worldwide — including the Seattle International Film Festival last year, where Giordana was named best director — Miramax kept it on the shelf nearly two years before finally releasing it, with little fanfare.)
With brothers Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo (the matinee-idol-handsome Alessio Boni) at its center, the film follows the multigenerational Carati family for four decades, from the '60s to the present.
The Caratis go through the kinds of changes that all families do — weddings, births, illnesses, deaths, all against a backdrop of time marching on — as we check in on them, every few years, watching little pockets of their lives. Nicola and Matteo were born after the war, as part of a generation of hope. They are young men as the film begins, idealistic and dreaming. In some ways, life changes them; in others, they remain the same.There's no reason to attempt to summarize this warmhearted film's sprawling plot, and thus deny you the pleasure of discovering the Caratis for yourself.
Better to recall a few of its many, many grace notes: the warm light of a family kitchen; the way a mother, seeing her long-lost daughter from a distance, looks as if she's just been nourished; the camera lingering on the tidy belongings of someone who has died; the tiny voice of a grandmother who has just learned of her grandchild (the gentlest "Un bambino?"); a not-quite-young man who says "I don't believe in exclamation points anymore" and almost believes it; and most of all a walk in the woods, late in Part 2, that brings the story full circle in the most generous and magical way.
Giordana, screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, director of photography Roberto Forza, and the entire cast and crew (to whom I do a great disservice by not singling them all out by name) have created a brilliant, sprawling piece of cinematic art, and perhaps the best film of the year. Find six hours in your life, and go; you'll be richly rewarded.
Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com
"The Best of Youth, Parts 1 and 2," with Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessio Boni, Adriana Asti, Sonia Bergamasco, Fabrizio Gifuni, Maya Sansa, Lidia Vitale, Valentina Carnelutti. Directed by Marco Tullio Giordana, from a screenplay by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli. 366 minutes. Rated R for language and brief nudity. In Italian with English subtitles. Varsity. (Note: Part 1 screens today through May 22, Part 2 screens May 20-26; call the Varsity at 206-781-5755 for showtimes. Each part is approximately three hours; separate admission is charged.)