Virzì is no doubt one of Italy's most interesting directors, but the pace is much slower here than in other films of his. The teenage predicaments and great expectations of a lonely summer are captured quite successfully by the movie as a whole, but too many tales are started only to be left substantially untold. The acting is generally good, but rather subdued, with none of the performers offering a fully convincing feat. (I'm actually striving to remember a really good one by Morante and frankly I can't think of any, at least not in recent years.) There is an obsessive (and quantitatively excessive) use of 80s riffs throughout the movie, and one wonders if this is an attempt to speed up the movie or simply a captatio benevolentiae on the part of the author. By the way, I was there in 1987. "Lullaby" by the Cure was released in early 1989 (oops).
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