The movie opens with disaster obviously about to
strike, and it does very soon when a mother driving her two daughters gets distracted and
crashes and kills herself. Dad uproots
the family from Chicago home to spend a summer teaching in Genoa hoping that there they
can collectively try to overcome their loss.
Beautifully shot in the alleyways of the old part of
the city director Michael Winterbottom seems to infuse an awful lot of
misleading suspense in a story that actually turns out to have very little plot in the end. Dad (Colin Firth, as his steady reliable self)
is grumpy with his ex girlfriend Barbara (Catherine Keener doing her usual best
with a very scant role) who seems to still carry a torch for him, and he dabbles
with a female student who has a crush on him, but as with the rest of the story,
nothing much happens there too. Kelly,
the teenage daughter seems to wired up discovering her sexuality with the
local boys on their Vespa’s, and Mary the youngest kid, holds her
self responsible for her mother’s death and has nightmares and hallucinations (which
also come to naught).
I was drawn to the movie because Mr. Winterbottom who
never sticks to the same genre twice usually always delivers such fascinating cinematic
delights. Not this time, and that’s
probably why the movie only surfaced at a couple of Film Festivals in the US before
going straight to DVD after languishing on some distributor’s shelf for a couple
of years.
R.T.V. It's a great travelogue of Genova and some of the surrounding beaches
