If you liked "Ricordati di me" and "La meglio gioventu'" you will probably also like "La bestia nel cuore". If, on the other hand, you found it painful to watch those films, both because they are so bad "in assoluto" but also because you can only feel distraught at how far they have fallen from the masterpieces of Italian cinema, then "La bestia nel cuore" is not for you. "La bestia nel cuore" has the same melodramatic dialogue and plot, the same soap-operatic style of acting (Alessio Boni, who is in this one and also in "La meglio gioventu'" is the worst offender), the same mawkish musical score (strings abound), the same uninspired direction (according to the standard TV play-book), the same cast of bourgeois and petty bourgeois characters (each and every one self-absorbed and "antipatico").
The present cohort of young Italian actors and directors was the first generation to be raised and steeped in television, particularly in the very bad TV series imported from the US in the 70s and 80s—and it shows. But the explanation goes deeper. Italian cinema from the late 40s through the mid-80s was, at its best,a cinema that chronicled and portrayed the post-war crisis in Italian society, economy, politics, and mores. Its characters were at once fully fleshed out in psychological terms but also representative of and immersed in this crisis of Italian life. In a sense, their individual egos were the backdrop to that crisis, and the films had an edge and urgency to them (however light and comedic at times), because they spoke directly to the crisis.
The current spate of bad Italian cinema has reversed that relationship: Italian society is a mere backdrop to the crisis in individual psyches. And since the psychology here is strictly pop and 3rd rate, the resultant cinema is little more than pap and drivel. (Incidentally, Bertolucci's work is itself illustrative of this trajectory—and even Moretti's recent work, "Il caimano", a film nominally about Berlusconi, lapses into this kind of navel- gazing.)
One point of critical trivia that I cannot resist: Why should Daniele's child, born and raised in Charlottesville Virginia by an Italian father and an American mother speak with a British accent?
The present cohort of young Italian actors and directors was the first generation to be raised and steeped in television, particularly in the very bad TV series imported from the US in the 70s and 80s—and it shows. But the explanation goes deeper. Italian cinema from the late 40s through the mid-80s was, at its best,a cinema that chronicled and portrayed the post-war crisis in Italian society, economy, politics, and mores. Its characters were at once fully fleshed out in psychological terms but also representative of and immersed in this crisis of Italian life. In a sense, their individual egos were the backdrop to that crisis, and the films had an edge and urgency to them (however light and comedic at times), because they spoke directly to the crisis.
The current spate of bad Italian cinema has reversed that relationship: Italian society is a mere backdrop to the crisis in individual psyches. And since the psychology here is strictly pop and 3rd rate, the resultant cinema is little more than pap and drivel. (Incidentally, Bertolucci's work is itself illustrative of this trajectory—and even Moretti's recent work, "Il caimano", a film nominally about Berlusconi, lapses into this kind of navel- gazing.)
One point of critical trivia that I cannot resist: Why should Daniele's child, born and raised in Charlottesville Virginia by an Italian father and an American mother speak with a British accent?