My women's movie A 30-year-old American woman comes to Italy with her cellist husband. And cellists, you know, they're such troubled types that jokes about them are no less than about bassists or tru-black metal players. Tell me if a normal man can carry that empty coffin of Aki Django. I mean Franco Nero! Not James Fox!!!!, but scattering it, making such creepy noises? But I was distracted by my maiden... So, while the husband in the conservatory plays with the dull listeners on the nerves, our 30-year-old American, walking around Italy in proud loneliness, meets on the street 19-year-old pretty tanned countryman and tied up between them something there. Kat Koiro, the screenwriter-director, does not hide that the plot is “a little predictable”, and, in proof, gives out these wonderful dialogues:
Husband: Are you sleeping with him?
- What do you think? - What do you think?
When before the final credits, a female voice suddenly gently sang the lines “It’s 4 in the morning... the end of december...”, I got goosebumps all over my body (however, at that moment I was sitting with my back to the open window, and on the street – hellish cold and rain like out of a bucket, so it is possible that I’m banally frozen and maybe soon get sick, and then, hopefully, recover). For some reason, from the very beginning, I instinctively waited for Leonard Cohen and in the end was not surprised, but touched - Kat Koiro hit me in the heel. All those 80 minutes in a row, the Italian island of Ischia reminded me of the Greek island of Hydra, and the stuffy love story was the novel “Favorite Game.” Nice to meet you.
Strictly speaking, we have a very simple story in our hands, and I adore simple stories. Consider it a Titanic, but without a ship. Or Anna Karenina, but no train. Oh, no, with the train anyway. Yes, that's right, that's the real (!) modern Anna Karenina. You should have learned, Joe Reiterman!
It is necessary to interest the reader, viewer or listener in what happens to the characters. Not what happens to them, but what happens to them every second. We know how the story ends. We all know how life will end, but we still live. And Kat Koiro made an ordinary film about ordinary people and their ordinary lives. Ordinary problems, ordinary fears are real problems and real fears. No problem. Nothing new - just a good women's movie is all about the same thing. Like late Woody Allen, only better. If I were a woman, I would be proud of this movie.
7 out of 10
If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me
Your enemy is sleeping and his woman is free.
Yes, and thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried. - Leonard Cohen