review: L'amico di famiglia (The Family Friend) PDF Print E-mail
Written by Boyd van Hoeij   
Thursday, 06 July 2006
Paolo Sorrentino’s follow-up to his critical favourite Le conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love) is called L'amico di famiglia (The Family Friend). Like the Swedish Mun mot mun (Mouth to Mouth) which is also playing here at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the production design and cinematography attract attention to themselves, creating a self-conscious type of visual language that works in Runge's film but barely gels in L'amico. In one of the film’s early scenes, an undressed woman stand in front of an electric blue wall that looks like something out of a cult designer home, but we learn that in fact the wall is one of the backrooms of the shop of tailor and money lender Geremia de Geremei, who is, or so we will learn not much later, such a penny-pincher that it is unlikely that he would have any interest in procuring such a piece of design, even if he could afford it.

Geremia (played to gleeful perfection by Giacomo Rizzo) is a money lender for the poor: he deals only in small amounts, but the interests are nevertheless exorbitant and sometimes literally cutthroat. Though clearly in his sixties, the man blessed with an ungly countenance still lives with his bed-ridden mother who taught him the trade. He is still looking for a bride, and soon one beautiful example (Laura Chiatti) will cross his path, though she is not his; in fact her parents are clients of Geremia’s who need to borrow money to pay for their daughter’s wedding. Geremia then proceeds to promise her a lower rate if he is allowed to touch her.   

Geremia is a thoroughly unpleasant character, and the film consciously proceeds without any effort to getting the audience emotionally invested in even just one of the characters. This evident obstinacy will likely be hard on many viewers, who will find it difficult to find a reason to sit through an entire film whose moral philosophy seems to have no place for any form of Dostoyevskian redemption.

Whereas Tita, the protagonist of Le conseguenze dell'amore, was a gracefully desperate man, Geremia is just plain ugly. It is perhaps closer to the truth (and L'amico di famiglia is certainly a much denser portrait of society than its austere predecessor) but it does not necessarily make for a more interesting film.

This film was screened as part of the 2006 Karlovy Vary Film Festival. 
 
 

 

 
 
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