This is a somewhat abstract movie. Its basic idea is that two very different men, a coke-addict crooner and a failed football coach, have the same name, Antonio Pisapia. It might be a coincidence, but their lives are almost symmetrical: both try to get back to fame and success (the singer was a star until a sexual scandal and the abuse of cocaine made him disreputable - this may seem unrealistic today, but the story is set in the Italian 1980s, when you still could not do everything; as for the coach, he was a brilliant and clever player but his teammates broke his knee during a training because he didn't want to fix a match). Both characters have a past they regret, and are unable to build the future they wish. Both have problems in their personal relations. Both are talented, but live in a place and a time where nobody cares about talent. Both are surrounded by cynical people who do not respect integrity, seriousness, passion, personality.
However, the stories of the two men will cross in the end, when Pisapia the coach commits suicide, having understood he is never going to get a team to train, and Pisapia the singer takes revenge by shooting the owner of the football team which refused to hire the coach. I can't say that the ending is fully persuasive: it looks like something put there to connect the two independent plots of the movie, which might have stayed independent, or should have been connected in a more meaningful way. However, the two actors (Andrea Renzi, mostly a theater actor, and Toni Servillo) deliver two good performance, and the world they live in is well rendered by Sorrentino. It may sometime remind of the movies Fassbinder was making in the 1970s, with a similar atmosphere of disaffection and human coldness.
However, the stories of the two men will cross in the end, when Pisapia the coach commits suicide, having understood he is never going to get a team to train, and Pisapia the singer takes revenge by shooting the owner of the football team which refused to hire the coach. I can't say that the ending is fully persuasive: it looks like something put there to connect the two independent plots of the movie, which might have stayed independent, or should have been connected in a more meaningful way. However, the two actors (Andrea Renzi, mostly a theater actor, and Toni Servillo) deliver two good performance, and the world they live in is well rendered by Sorrentino. It may sometime remind of the movies Fassbinder was making in the 1970s, with a similar atmosphere of disaffection and human coldness.
