Mai più come prima (Never Again Like Before) from director Giacomo Campiotti (Come due coccodrilli/Like Two Crocodiles) is one of the more pleasant surprises of recent Italian cinema. Written by the director in collaboration with Russian writer-director Aleksandr Adabashyan, the film follows a group of pupils during and after their secondary school exams, when they go on a trip to the Dolomite Mountains. Though the film’s opening scenes seem to recall the recent avalanche of Italian films showcasing sexy pupils with typical adolescent problems such as Notte prima degli esami (Night Before Finals), Ma che ci faccio qui (What Am I Doing Here?) and Melissa P, Campiotti only uses the early scenes -- set during the school exams -- to quickly establish his characters and then moves on to the film’s heart of darkness.

 

Sporty but pensive Enrico (Marco Casu) is the instigator of the trip and also the most prepared; he has been climbing mountains for years with his father and now wants to go at it alone, or rather, with a select group of friends. They are Max (Nicola Cipolla), a spastic with cerebral palsy; Lorenzo (Marco Velluti), who gets an ego boost by telling his teachers exactly what he thinks of them; his decorative airhead girlfriend Giulia (Laura Chiatti), a blonde; bookish ugly duckling Martina (Natalia Piatti), in every way Giulia’s opposite, and grungy punkster Cesare or Fava (Federico Battilocchio). The film has some fun with its stereotype youngsters, indulging in some but not in others, but once the characters are established and an accident in the mountains radically changes both the film and the characters’ lives, it becomes clear that even the characters did not know who they were to begin with.

 

What happens up there in the Dolomites throws all their young lives into a crisis that will leave a profound mark on them, and the film’s latter half explores with an unusual eye for detail what effect this traumatic experience has had on their lives. The film benefits from a uniformly excellent cast (mostly composed of young unknowns and reigned-in character actors who play their parents) and some of the outdoor shots of the Dolomites are breathtaking (though a few are reminiscent of studio back-projection a la Douglas Sirk).