This is a very European movie. Whereas Hollywood overstates, Europe understates. The story is based on the autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli, born in 1922, who became a prominent Italian stage director and achieved world fame as a director of filmed stage pieces such as "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet, and "La Traviata." The film deals with the years 1935-44. After the death of his mother Zeffirelli, or Luca in the film, an illegitimate child more or less rejected by his father, was looked after by a group of eccentric art-loving English ladies who had made Florence their home - on their terms. The locals call them the "Scorpioni" - a tribute to their acid tongues. When Mussolini declared war on Britain in 1940, the ladies were interned in a beautiful mountaintop village near Florence, guarded by a couple of long-suffering policeman, their lifestyle of sketching, painting, art appreciation and fine dining scarcely changing.
The setting is the Florentine treasure troves of Tuscan art, the Uffizi, Il Duomo and the Academy. The English are led by three grand dames of the theatre, Joan Plowright as Arabella, Luca's chief protector, Maggie Smith, and Judy Dench (with her real life husband Michael Williams in a supporting role as the British consul.). Then there are two equally larger than life Americans, a retired but still glamorous movie star played by Cher, and a bike-riding lesbian archaeologist played by Lily Tomlin. Most of the Italian characters are overshadowed by all this Anglo ego. (Or maybe it's just poor dubbing, or John Mortimer's part in the scriptwriting). The two boys playing Luca at different ages are good looking but the older one in particular is a bit vacuous, and Cher's impossibly handsome Italian boyfriend puts in a wooden performance.
There are a couple of plot-lines (will Cher escape the Jewish round-up, will the ladies make it through the war OK) and the occasional funny scene but the interest is really in the characters. Not that all of them are particularly attractive people. Maggie Smith's Lady Hester, widow of a former British Ambassador to Italy, is a dreadful old snob with hardly any brains who likes the fascists and has scarcely a good word for anybody else except her late husband. She engineers the tea party with Il Duce, fondly imagining that Mussolini himself will ensure the ladies' safety in Florence. A few days later the local fascists tip them out of the Uffizi gallery where they were accustomed to take tea while they sketched the old masters. Yet at the end she does show a little genuine good grace when she intervenes to help Cher.
It's a curious piece, reminiscent of "Life is Beautiful" - a light comedy with a deadly serious titanic struggle between good and evil going on in the background, a background which seems altogether too gorgeous to accommodate such evil. Good, represented by a Scottish major, triumphs in the end, only to be put in his place by the Scorpioni. Zeffirelli here pays his artistic and personal debt to them. Wacky though they were, the Scorpioni did know the difference between good and evil, or at least the difference between good art and bad art, and they taught Zeffirelli well.
