I think this is a good movie that could have been great. It "sits between two stools". Sometimes it tries to be funny, others "serious", "dealing with contentious issues" but even then, with a light approach.
What is always there is the cliché, the corny twist. I love whatever is Italian, if you show me whichever of their old buildings I instantly love them. So their people, with the quirks only a fellow "Italian" like me can understand. Nevertheless, I don't think a film should be granted more score just because you like the topics, language, scenery and characters.
I never felt anything for anybody. And that's quite bad for an Italian movie... I'm afraid it stays within the surface, never really saying anything we don't already know. Sometimes one could even know how the "episodes" would end... (they're quite predictable).
What I do like is that many stories are left unfinished, maybe because there's no easy way out. Like the black man being left out of the bar because of his colour. Others, like the cleaning man clinging to the blue collar's car is purportedly comic, but grossly so. You can't have it both ways. I'm not sure I'd like to meet this "auteur", and that's a very personal way I have to know whether I like a film or not.
Italian women have a way of being beautiful and suggestive that's also here. I can think of the estranged wife, and even the lesbian love between tables.
Actors are fine, they don' seem to be acting at all. The script fails. Like the one at the beginning, with this man who's supposed to be a reporter. I didn't get the point of it, were it American one would think it's TV humour alla "Friends" when they put people in "awkward" situations so we instantly "identify" with them. Which comes by me as bad as their fast food. Or the man in the cemetery, what a botched idea!! It being genial, he waists it by placing the narrator talk (monologue) to the woman driver about his hearings of the dead. Which makes him a freak, like the ghost of "Russian Ark".
The whole cinema roared of laughter with the quip the old man who's going to be sent to a geriatric says to the "woman in her 60s but still attractive". But putting, again, an old character reciting the many synonyms of "dick" just to "show the youngster what's right" is demagogue at best. Even if it feigns some "literary patina", like "Cyrano". By the way, the director is old, and it shows in all the choices he makes. He gets to be tyring.
Agree with "Kandrap" that you don't know what to think when you're out of the cinema. He illuminated me: old people have a preponderance here. Also true that it changes "mood" about halfway.
All in all, just for "sociologists" and lovers of Italy (like me, both categories). Thanks IMDb for covering unusual films like this one, and letting us voice our quibbles :)
