Shown recently in San Francisco for the SF Film Society's Screen series was Silvio Soldini’s latest movie, “Come Undone (Cosa Voglio di Più, 2010).”
The set up of the story is about an ordinary life of an ordinary couple, lived against the dull landscape of Milan’s hinterland. Such an environment becomes the improbable theater of a supposedly healthy injection of southern passion, which unexpectedely breaks in, shocks and revitalize one of these uninspired lives. That occurs when a waiter from Calabria shows up (played by a realistic Pierfrancesco Favino), with Mediterranean traits that are enough for a lower middle class northern blond (the likeable Alba Rohrwacher) to let him to mess up her life, along with that of the man himself.
Except it can’t work, not even for a short while.
What was felt as a healthy—though adulterous— thrill, will soon slide down the slippery slope into a grim hopelessness, in a provincial environment where it’s almost impossible for these people to escape the ties of the family and the job. They can barely go unnoticed even in the once-a-week getaway at the motel for the adulterous intercourse.
In this situation, Italian guilt blended with familial and social sense of shame completes the picture.
Realism and delicate feelings are usually what you get from Silvio Soldini’s movies. Realism—pay attention—not necessarily reality.
For example, one keeps on asking if in real Italian life there actually are people talking as softly as in Soldini’s stories.
But Mr.Soldini’s eye is realistic nevertheless. His storytelling is almost always objective, letting us see the actions unfold in front of us most of the time without explanatory dialogues, and almost isolating the characters from their environment —we get the only clear long shot of Milan late in the story.
The result can be read as breathless and hopeless.
The story leaves a lot to wonder about the social and cultural background for these kinds of unfulfilled existences, but nothing is said directly in the movie. The big picture is simply left out.
Obviously we are talking about the life of the provincial “deep-North”: an area of Italy that, although extremely productive, can sometimes turn depressing, due to its cold and foggy winter weather, its unfortunate architectural panorama, and a certain inwardness of northerners.
But this by itself would justify some Xanax, in an ordinary order of things.
What instead sets Mr.Soldini apart from some Northern European authors—for example— is that he always manages to keep his stories one step short of total dullness.
All in all, the two protagonists of the movie have families around, decent jobs and nice colleagues. And even if nothing seems really cheerful about their urban, lower-middle class life, even if there’s little spark under that Italian sun, one can still catch a glimpse of hope, here and there: in the kindness of a husband, in the warmth of a large family, in an outing to a ski resort, and in the gossipy complicity you can establish with your friends in the office, on the commuter train, on weekday social nights, on Friday nights out... and that’s about it.
Nothing sparkling. Everything predictable. But still more than nothing.
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