Avati’s Sconfinata Giovinezza
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Rather than Una Sconfinata Giovinezza (“Endless Youth”), explains Pupi Avati in reference to the title of his latest film, “it should have been called An Endless Childhood”: “At this time in my life, having reached the second part of the second half, I can feel stirring within me the eight-year-old child I thought I had silenced and forgotten”.
Known for his affectionately nostalgic films, the Bologna-born director has chosen to explore his own memories (his parents who died in a car accident, the “self-sufficient games” in provincial Emilia Romagna) in a painful yet serene story. It centres on Lino (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) and Chicca (Francesca Neri, making her third film with Avati), two respected professionals who have been happily married for many years: “How do you say when someone buts in and interrupts two people who are talking?”. Lino works with words, he’s a sports journalist, and this question is the first sign of his developing Alzheimer’s, which pitilessly erases the medium and short term, bringing back to the surface only memories of a distant past.
Read the article on www.cineuropa.org