Although the golden age of Italian cinema probably stopped a couple of decades ago after a formidable run beginning with the neo-realist movement, Paolo Virzi's The First Beautiful Thing captures some of the realism and confusion of life in the 1970's through present day. Propelled by several sometimes confusing flashbacks, it still makes sense when it focuses on mother and son and a tempestuous, oedipal string of lasting impressions.
Anna (Michella Ramazzotti) is a beautiful mother, wife, and local hottie who wins the Summer Mother Beauty Contest of 1971, setting off a series of jealousies (even her young son), and infidelities, as befitting the not quite stereotypical mother/whore motif. Son Bruno, played as an adult by Valerio Mastanrea, grows up to be a professor and a misanthropist whose recurring images of his chaotic mother disturb him and alienate him from his sister Valeria (Claudia Pandolfi) and his mother, played in her later years by Stephania Sandrelli.
Bruno is more memorable than his mother because he is far more complicated, a drug addict who struggles to please his cancerous mother in her last days and reconcile with his sister. While Bruno's oedipal inclinations have not been overpowering, mother Anna has a couple of scenes where she treats him like a lover rather than a son. Regardless of those clues, it is not until they are permanently separated that he is free to swim with his girlfriend, seemingly washed of his mother and free to love.
Compare this mother/whore story with the recent much more oblique I am Love or the more openly incestuous Murmur of the Heart, and you can see why it comes closer to telenovela than a classic, The Priest's Wife, in which Sophia Loren challenges a priest's vow of celibacy. Anna wrecks her children's lives, according to her son, but she has an aura of likability that begs the audience to care for her when she has mostly confused the lives of many men and children, too.
Although the story lacks sophisticated dialogue and the plot is unnecessarily complex, the film is a moving treatise on the effects of absent mothers and estranged sons on family happiness.
Anna (Michella Ramazzotti) is a beautiful mother, wife, and local hottie who wins the Summer Mother Beauty Contest of 1971, setting off a series of jealousies (even her young son), and infidelities, as befitting the not quite stereotypical mother/whore motif. Son Bruno, played as an adult by Valerio Mastanrea, grows up to be a professor and a misanthropist whose recurring images of his chaotic mother disturb him and alienate him from his sister Valeria (Claudia Pandolfi) and his mother, played in her later years by Stephania Sandrelli.
Bruno is more memorable than his mother because he is far more complicated, a drug addict who struggles to please his cancerous mother in her last days and reconcile with his sister. While Bruno's oedipal inclinations have not been overpowering, mother Anna has a couple of scenes where she treats him like a lover rather than a son. Regardless of those clues, it is not until they are permanently separated that he is free to swim with his girlfriend, seemingly washed of his mother and free to love.
Compare this mother/whore story with the recent much more oblique I am Love or the more openly incestuous Murmur of the Heart, and you can see why it comes closer to telenovela than a classic, The Priest's Wife, in which Sophia Loren challenges a priest's vow of celibacy. Anna wrecks her children's lives, according to her son, but she has an aura of likability that begs the audience to care for her when she has mostly confused the lives of many men and children, too.
Although the story lacks sophisticated dialogue and the plot is unnecessarily complex, the film is a moving treatise on the effects of absent mothers and estranged sons on family happiness.