After a long parenthesis in the US Gabriele Muccino has come back home, having learnt some good lessons from American cinematography: be highly technically professional, take an attractive cast, add some intriguing screenplay, wrap everything with a quick pace and some emotional music, and the audience will be yours. "Baciami ancora" shows all these qualities, which are indeed part of a professional and economic conception of a movie, conceived as a product to be placed on the market, and, on the whole, I cannot define it a low-quality movie from a technical point of view.
Obviously, when you unwrap the magic box, and go to the substance, some disappointment will spring outside. While the first movie "L'ultimo bacio", was a sad, but true and original, from an Italian cinematographic point of view, portrait of lost and disillusioned thirty years old people, if this sequel has been conceived as a portrait of today's forty years old ones, the result is at least completely out of frame. Characters and situations are so out of reality, that it is hard to believe that the director is convinced of the truthfulness of his product. Or he may has lived so far away from Italy, as not to realize that in ten years the country has changed. Here we just find some well off "grown ups", who, probably having no other problem in life, can allow themselves to play at love as if it were a society game. The result is women behaving like teenagers, victims of hormone imbalance, shifting from "I no longer love you" of one day, to "I have never stopped loving you" of the following, with the same easiness with which they shift bed, mate, up to becoming unexpectedly and miraculously pregnant. Men, unfaithful, and possessive more than animals, who shift from hysterical, neurotic explosions, to some mystic peace of mind, going out of and into families with terrifying nonchalance. To the point that to me, Paolo, the only pathologically depressed, seemed the most sane. And the finale is really an apotheosis of hypocrisy, I would have expected at least a more honest ending....
The cast is not bad, although the absence of Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Giulia is strongly felt, being her substitute too young and weak. I liked Pierfrancesco Favino, irresistible in his hysterical, funny butades, and also appreciated the more silent and discrete parts of Giorgio Pasotti and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and the relation between Adriano and Adele, as the most credible one. I don't know how the public will react to this picture, but I got the impression it will be a short parenthesis in Italy for Muccino, before going back to his friend Will Smith.
