My Brother Is An Only Child

Rating:

* * * *

Verdict:

A highly enjoyable Italian family drama with winning performances

A testosterone-laden, coming-of-age story set in Italy in the late 1960s might seem a well-worn genre but Luchetti, who worked with several other writers to adapt Antonio Pennacchi's semi-autobiographical 2003 novel

The Fasciocommunist

, avoids the usual cliches in a well-observed film that is engrossing, touching and dramatic.

He is helped hugely by a trio of terrific performances, particularly that of the effortlessly winning Germano in the main part of Accio. The son of solid working-class folk - he remarks at one point that he has been brought up "the old way" - he's a troubled twentysomething living in Latina, one of Mussolini's model "new towns" built in the 1930s on the outskirts of Rome.

Accio has, to his parents' chagrin, quit the seminary and is enticed to join the reincarnated Fascists "to redeem the lost honour of this nation".

Meanwhile his elder brother Manrico (heart-throb Scamarcio) is a passionate Communist - and to complicate matters further, is squiring Francesca (Fleri), who inevitably sets Accio's pulse pounding.

The storyline has a few other complications in store, not least Accio's problematic involvement with a much older woman, but if the elements are familiar, the way they fit together is not.

The film may seem like a meditation on the clash between the personal and political, but it's both less and more than that. With conspicuous exceptions like Bertolucci's

The Conformist

, Italian film-makers have been less interested than the rest of Europe in confronting their distasteful national past and this film changes none of that. The political assumptions of its two main characters are never interrogated and even when the two groups clash, the soundtrack is a jaunty gypsy swing. Anyway, it's hard to get horrified at the fascists' disruption of a communist Beethoven concert when the revolutionaries delete Schiller's words from

Ode to Joy

and make it an ode to Mao and Stalin: they were asking for a thrashing, really.

A beautiful production design distinguishes a highly enjoyable movie in which every character is one we can care about. Outstanding.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Elio Germano, Riccardo Scamarcio, Diane Fleri, Angela Finocchiaro

Director:

Daniele Luchetti

Running time:

99 mins

Rating:

M (contains violence, sexual references and offensive language) In Italian with English subtitles

Screening:

Academy