Lately I've come to appreciate small, intimate movies that are in the 'slice of life' style. This Italian gem I recently sampled is a worthy example.
The eponymous Gianni is a retiree in Rome, somewhere on the long end of middle-age. His wife still works, thus he is sent off on various domestic errands during working hours, and this he is content to do. Then there's his somewhat confused daughter and her equally shiftless boyfriend who has moved into their home. There's Gianni's rich, demanding mother who has him at her beck and call. And then there's his friend and peer Alfonso, a rakish lawyer who attempts to get Gianni off the straight and narrow and into the fast lane of late-age sexual/romantic dalliance.
Now this straight and narrow as it were, is very much Gianni's choice. It's just that he has reached a point where he is seemingly invisible to the young women around him. Invisible and inaudible. He is touchingly earnest in his realization, accepting it with a kind of shrugging melancholy. But he has the persistent Alfonso who keeps nudging him away from this acceptance; even if we don't know if Alfonso is actually successful with the young women himself.
And there are a few very beautiful women around poor Gianni. First, the downstairs neighbor, a hazel-eyed sprite who flirts with him relentlessly, turns out to have passed off her dog-walking duties on him. Then the identical blond twins, Alfonso's clients; Gianni's mother's caretaker; another woman who is an old flame, and yet another who is an old acquaintance: they make up the rolls as he shambles around amiably trying to see where he can get.
Read full review at http://devikamenon.blogspot.com/2016/06/foreign- movie-Friday-gianni-e-le-donne.html
