Screened this morning for the press at Roma film festival, "N - io e Napoleone" is easy to love. First of all it can count on great production values, as very few Italian films nowadays can, with wonderful settings and costumes. The cast is great too. Director Virzì constantly speaks of the young lead Elio Germano as "a young De Niro". Now, of course he is going a way too far, but sure the boy can act. I loved his performance, and he did a great job with the (tuscan) accent. Daniel Auteuil is a great actor and did very well as Bonaparte. It's really great to see him acting in Italian, I hope to see him working in Italy again very soon. The supporting cast worked well too - people like Valerio Mastrandrea or Sabrina Impacciatore may seem unlikely choices, but they all gave fine performances. Even Massimo Ceccherini, best known for appearing in his own moronic films and in trashy TV reality shows, fitted in well and was actually funny. The low point of the cast was the "Diva" Monica Bellucci. Sure, she was slightly better than usual, but she managed to look (and sound) utterly unnatural even in the part of baronessa Emilia, in which, with a good dose of self irony, she used her own umbro accent. The script, by veteran Furio Scarpelli and Virzì himself is clever, with lots of laugh out loud lines, and a few very emotional moments too. Sure, the ending left me puzzled. The message is kind of ambiguous: the whole film says that political ideals can bring you to blind hate, but if you get closer you will learn that the object of your hate is after all a little human being like everyone else, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes pathetic, so that suddenly it's difficult to hate him; then, in the last few minutes it says that after all it would have been better to shoot him in the head at the beginning. Personally, I dislike very much this notion. "Io e Napoleone" is still a pleasant film, the best presented at the Festival so far (the other being Fur and the Hoax). My rating is 8/10
Review of N (Io e Napoleone)
