We first see Luciana Proietti in 1957 as a girl who is dressed like a little bride. She's supposed to be having her first holy communion, but instead flees the church. She's no Catholic but has inherited her late father's faith in Communism (the previous year's invasion of Hungary clearly didn't bother her.) We follow her and her large , awkward brother as they glory in the Soviet Union's early lead in the space race, and we get plenty of Soviet footage from that time.
Luciana goes from chubby child to sulky, not very attractive adolescent. She resents her mother's re-marriage to a bourgeois engineer, and for someone who's supposed to care about mankind she's depressingly self-centred, and sometimes cruel. She uses a fat young comrade for kissing practice while lusting after the best-looking of Trullo's young Communists. She accuses her mother (Claudia Pandolfi) of only marrying her stepfather (Sergio Rubini) for his money, and calls him a fascist. Worst of all she calls her brother, who's prone to epileptic fits, a "sick retard", causing him to disappear for ages and the family to fear for his life.
Despite my reservations about the leading character, I enjoyed the film. It ends with a nice irony: we see the Americans have overtaken the Soviets in pointless space exploration and planted their flag on the moon. The acting is good throughout, and the director (who also plays a childless Communist who takes a kindly interest in Luciana) is obviously talented. The film isn't autobiographical (Ms Nicchiarelli wasn't born until 1975), and as I didn't hang around for the Q and A I didn't find out if she had a upbringing similar to Luciana's. The fact that her latest film is about Marx's daughter suggests an interest in Communism that was shared by many Italians. They, of course, never had to live under that rotten system: my family in Eastern Europe weren't so lucky.
Luciana goes from chubby child to sulky, not very attractive adolescent. She resents her mother's re-marriage to a bourgeois engineer, and for someone who's supposed to care about mankind she's depressingly self-centred, and sometimes cruel. She uses a fat young comrade for kissing practice while lusting after the best-looking of Trullo's young Communists. She accuses her mother (Claudia Pandolfi) of only marrying her stepfather (Sergio Rubini) for his money, and calls him a fascist. Worst of all she calls her brother, who's prone to epileptic fits, a "sick retard", causing him to disappear for ages and the family to fear for his life.
Despite my reservations about the leading character, I enjoyed the film. It ends with a nice irony: we see the Americans have overtaken the Soviets in pointless space exploration and planted their flag on the moon. The acting is good throughout, and the director (who also plays a childless Communist who takes a kindly interest in Luciana) is obviously talented. The film isn't autobiographical (Ms Nicchiarelli wasn't born until 1975), and as I didn't hang around for the Q and A I didn't find out if she had a upbringing similar to Luciana's. The fact that her latest film is about Marx's daughter suggests an interest in Communism that was shared by many Italians. They, of course, never had to live under that rotten system: my family in Eastern Europe weren't so lucky.
