NESSUNA QUALITA AGLI EROI

Italy, 2007, 102 minutes, Colour.
Irene Jacob.
Directed by Paolo Franchi

This is quite a miserable film. It has winter settings in both Turin and Geneva.

It focuses on a middle aged man who seems to be undergoing a crisis, unable to have children, resenting his artist father, in love with his wife and depending on her but wandering around the city. He encounters a young man who befriends him, takes him home, and continues to follow him everywhere, even to the exhibition of his fathers work. As they talk, we see more of the young man, his sexual encounters with is girlfriend, his fantasies about the middle aged man's wife.

It emerges that the young man has killed his banker father to whom the middle aged man was indebted. However, at the end of the film, we see the middle aged man going to the police to confess that he killed the banker. It seems that the young man was his alter-ego.

While, finally, the plot makes a great deal of sense in terms of this psychological drama, the tone is particularly grim, gloomy - and rather hard going.

1.A bleak drama? Crime, guilt, identity?

2.The Turin settings, winter, the colour photography but unsaturated? The locations, interiors and exteriors? Geneva? The exhibition? The musical score?

3.The title, the father’s painting, the explanation? Bruno and his relationship to his father, the story of the painting? The exhibition? His mother’s speech? The other paintings?

4.The character of Bruno, the portrait, a middle-aged man, in crisis, wandering the city, his wife and his relationship with her, sexual? Emotional? His financial situation, the loan, asking the extension? The encounter with Lucas, socially, giving him a false name? The later encounters, Lucas following him, the friendship, Lucas going to Geneva? Bruno becoming more morose, the dreams, his absences from the house, his wife’s puzzle? The disappearance of the banker, the suspicion of murder, the news? Confronting Lucas, and the death of his father? The accusation?

5.Lucas as a character, young, the relationship with his girlfriend, explicit scenes? The father and his absence? Issues of money? Lucas having the list of debtors? The approach, the false name from Bruno, the bond between them, following, identifying, his dreaming of sexual encounters with Bruno’s wife?

6.Bruno’s wife, the marriage, her concern, sexual intimacy, Geneva, at home? In Lucas’s fantasy?

7.The Geneva sequence, the exhibition, the background of Bruno, his mother making the speech? The party – and Bruno going out and away?

8.The ending and the plot coming together? The initial interrogation scene and Bruno’s health – and the recurring scene at the end and his confession of guilt? Lucas as Bruno’s alter-ego? The psychological dimensions, what in Lucas was Bruno? Why? The relationship with fathers? Murder?

9.A grim and gloomy experience of guilt and its consequences?