Il premio - 2017

 I didn’t like this at all. It started ok, but then you get to know the characters, and I so don’t like the main character, the one who takes it upon himself to ‘help the others with their lives’, although it doesn’t really seem like ‘help’ to me. Plus, smoking and drinking, giving money to young women and speaking in a vulgar way doesn’t make you young again, and it’s not ‘living to the full’ when you barely know or remember what you did. I also wouldn’t call messing up their lives: ‘helping’ .

Also, there were lots of little stupid things that I didn’t like, 

It starts with Oreste having a fight with his wife (that we never see, only hear her voice). She throws him out, so he asks to stay in a study that’s his father’s, but it’s occupied by Enora, a French artist.

The sort-of-butler/assistant Rinaldo wants him to stay in a guest room. He’s leaving with Master Giovanni Passamonte, a famous writer who just won a Nobel but doesn’t want to fly so they’ll drive there. Rinaldo hurts his back so Giovanni hires his son Oreste to drive.

Lucrezia, Oreste’s half-sister, stops them because she wants to go with them and record it for her blog. In Austria, they are stopped by the police and since they have 50.000euros cash, they’re breaking the rules. To keep their money, they have Oreste have a wrestling match with the cop. Since he remains standing for 63 seconds, they win and can go. They stay at the house of Giovanni’s friend Greta Bauer, an old actress who won her two oscars as the lead of his most famous book: Agata. He  tells her that he feels without inspiration and hates his latest novels, while Greta has planned everything to be put in cryogenic stasis because she has a disease. She wants to freeze her cat as well, but Oreste runs it over with the car and hides the body. 

In Copenhagen they stop to see Andrea, Oreste’s son. Giovanni keeps smoking weed, or oppium, whatever. Andrea and artist Britta go with them.

Britta finds Oreste quite handsome, so when Andrea tells Giovanni he found out  by mistake that his mom had an affair, Giovanni encourages Oreste to have sex with Britta and has Rinaldo film them and send the video to his wife.

Oreste is very angry, of course, in 20 years of marriage he never did something like that, and to know that his father set him up… they show him a picture that apparently proves his wife Barbara’s infidelity, but that does not make it right.

It also turns up that Giovanni got his hands on the book Lucrezia is writing, and he tells her she’ll never be good at this job.

After Oreste and Lucrezia talk, they sort of agree that he was right. 

Giovanni has bought a specific house, important to Rinaldo, and also track down ‘his one and only love’ Ingrid, and he leaves Rinaldo there with her. It’s annoying that she keeps calling him Giovanni though.

Giovanni encourages Oreste to be more assertive. At the ceremony, they meet rich Melissa and her handsome son Jurgen, and while Lucrezia talks and then has sex with him, Melissa confesses that it is quite possible that Junger is Giovanni’s son. When she’s told, Lucrezia goes into hysterics right there. Giovanni’s “did you F…?” was quite vulgar.

Rinaldo then comes in yelling against Giovanni because he found out that Ingrid had been with him too, and with lots of others too. He calls her names - quite unfairly since Rinaldo and Ingrid were only together for one summer many years ago and never saw each other again.

Still, he’s most angry at Giovanni because, he says, he thought they were friends. For some reason, everybody claps and laughs because of these bizarre Italians… MAH.

That night, Lucrezia tells Oreste she looked into her father’s things at home and found his speech and she tells Oreste that their dad wants to kill himself during the celebration. They try to talk to him but he says he’s changed his mind. He and Rinaldo are smoking weed in a hotel room with two women.

Greta is at the ceremony too, without her cat Sissi she changed her mind about the cryogenic sleep. Giovanni accepts his medal and makes a speech, not a bad one actually, and his new surprise is Britta sings on stage. And that’s the end: family more united than ever, all their fights forgotten. Mah!!!

Giovanni - Gigi Proietti

Oreste - Alessandro Gassman

Rinaldo - Rocco Papaleo

ITA sottotirolo, non basta vincerlo, devi anche ritirarlo.