Disappointed

As much as I love Castellitto as an actor and director, I could not help being embarrassed and annoyed at the same time while watching “Venute al Mondo”. I do not know the source material, i.e. the novel, so I can only express my opinion about the movie. Here are the points that made me dislike the movie:

- The plot is unnecessarily convoluted and complicated (though easy to follow) in a desperate attempt to keep the viewer interested – with a surprise ending (?) as the finale. Unfortunately, I could not care less about what had happened / was going to happen after the first fifteen minutes when the main characters had been introduced and their relationships established.

- The story is not “tragic” (look up the exact literary definition of the term), but simply based on pure chance and unlucky circumstances.

- Emile Hirsch plays his usual idealistic stock character (cf. “Into the Wild”) and overacts as usual.

- Penelope Cruz is once again reduced to the sex object desired by all the men she meets. Does anyone remember any movie with her where she does not have sex ?

- Adnan Haskovic plays the boisterous, charming, loud-mouthed, but at the same time melancholic intellectual poet – no cliché about the typical southern-/east European soulful and emotional male type is left out.

- The group of intellectual “friends” – who mostly meet again after all those years - is simply a bunch of boring, simple-minded individuals, although the film tries to present the atmosphere as cheerful, joyous and care-free. Shouldn’t these “intellectuals” have at least one (brief) intelligent discussion about what is politically going on outside (and in) their city?

- Not one scene about the siege of Sarajevo is shown that has not been seen hundreds of times (which does not make it less horrifying, but a lot more boring).

- Not a single sentence mentions the roots of the conflict or the warring parties (apart from one brief view of Karadzic during a television interview); not even once are words like “Serb”, “Bosnian” etc. mentioned. You have the good guys (we get to see them all the time) and the bad guys (who are just an anonymous bunch of killers and rapists). Do you know more – if anything at all – about the war in Yugoslavia after watching this movie ? I doubt it. The setting is completely irrelevant and the same story could have been set any time anywhere in any war.

- The characters’ emotions all seem completely faked and pretended; in an attempt to show “big emotions” to involve the audience the characters weep, cry, are desperate and angry (and before the war happy and cheerful), but hardly ever are these emotions motivated or justified, but simply “there” or caused by hair-risingly stupid, unmotivated situations

There are a lot more details which I found annoying, but I will leave it at that. I expected a lot more, esp. after “Non ti muovere”, but was deeply disappointed. The movie pretends to be something that it is not: A film about the horrors of the siege of Sarajevo and its consequences, but instead it presents as a bloated story about stereotypical individuals who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

If you enjoyed the movie, good for you. Tastes differ. So do not flame me – it is only my opinion, nothing more.