Mid-August Lunch hollywood: movie:
Genre:Comedy | Drama
Writers Gianni Di Gregorio (story) &Simone Riccardini
Director::Gianni Di Gregorio
Release Date:18 November 2009
Cast: Gianni Di Gregorio, Valeria De Franciscis, Marina Cacciotti, Maria Calì, Grazia Cesarini Sforza, Alfonso Santagata, Luigi Marchetti, Marcello Ottolenghi, Petre Rosu
Mid-August Lunch hollywood movie Reviews
Gianni is a middle-aged man living in Rome with his imposing and demanding elderly mother
I recently had the pleasure and privilege of presenting a prize for the best first film shown in the 2008 London film festival to Gianni Di Gregorio. It was a pleasure because I greatly admire his gentle, perceptive comedy Mid-August Lunch (aka Pranzo di Ferragosto), and a privilege because the prize is presented by the Satyajit Ray Foundation in memory of the director I revere beyond all others. The Satyajit Ray Award has been given every year since 1996 to a film “which best captures the artistry expressed in Ray’s own vision” and Di Gregorio could not have been a more appropriate recipient.
Almost 60 years ago, early in 1950, the newly married Ray, then working for an advertising agency in Calcutta, made his first visit to Europe to spend some months at the parent company’s headquarters in London. “Within three days of arriving in London, I saw De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves,” he later wrote. “I knew immediately that if I ever made Pather Panchali – and the idea had been at the back of my mind for some time – I would make it in the same way, using natural locations and unknown actors.”
On his return home, he wrote an article on “Some Italian Films I Have Seen” for the Indian Film Society Bulletin, which concluded: “For a popular medium, the best kind of inspiration should derive from life and its roots in it. No amount of technical polish can make up for artificiality of theme and dishonesty of treatment. The Indian film-maker must turn to life, to reality. De Sica and not DeMille should be his ideal.”
The 60-year-old Di Gregorio is best known to us as the screenwriter on Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone’s expansive, multilayered film about the terrible hold that organised crime has on Naples. His directorial debut, which Garrone has produced, is on a quite different scale. Partly autobiographical, shot entirely on location (mostly in Di Gregorio’s old family apartment) with a non-professional cast for a budget of under £430,000, Mid-August Lunch seems to meet all of Ray’s requirements.
Ray, I think, would have admired the film for its humanity, its concern for family and the elderly and for the way Di Gregorio suffers fools gladly. In addition to writing and directing, Di Gregorio plays the central character, also called Gianni, a bachelor in his late 50s, unemployed because he’s the full-time carer for his 90-year-old widowed mother.
They live in a well-furnished, somewhat shabby fourth-floor flat in the charming old Roman district of Trastevere. Inside, it’s dark, outside blindingly bright, and the time is the height of summer on the eve of Ferragosto. That’s the annual celebration on 15 August of the ascension of the Virgin Mary into Heaven and it empties the city. Older moviegoers will recall Luciano Emmer’s Sunday in August, an art house staple of the early 50s in which Marcello Mastroianni made one of his earliest screen appearances as a young cop in a white uniform patrolling the empty streets of a shimmering Rome.
Gianni is cash-strapped, slightly depressed, but cheerful in the company of his cantankerous mother (to whom he’s reading The Three Musketeers), his raffish chum, Viking, and the storekeeper who gives him wine on tick. In a very amusing confrontation with Alfredo, the accountant who administers the apartment block, Gianni is persuaded to take in Alfredo’s mother for Ferragosto in exchange for the postponement of rent arrears and utility bills, being relieved of his contribution to essential repairs and, the cherry on the cake, given a key to the shared lift.
When Alfredo delivers his mother, Marina, he also drops off his even older aunt, Maria, whose kids have gone elsewhere for the holidays. Looking down at Alfredo’s convertible parked in the street below, Gianni sees that the accountant’s companion for a supposed trip to a health resort is a lissom young blonde, the one little gesture towards Berlusconi’s Italy.
As Gianni goes about his three principal activities – smoking, drinking and cooking, often simultaneously – his doctor turns up and, after examining both son and mother, makes an offer that due to the accompanying financial inducement can’t be refused. So Gianni agrees to extend his hospitality to the doctor’s elderly mother, Grazia, who arrives with a list of dietary requirements and pills that would challenge a trained nurse. At this point, as Gianni deals with the elderly widows, all demanding in different ways, in a cramped flat, the film resembles the cabin sequence in A Night at the Opera, but is played as polite comedy instead of farce.
Initially tensions build up. Gianni’s mother wants to be alone. Maria attempts to take over in the kitchen. Grazia takes forbidden macaroni casserole from the fridge at night. Marina, after locking herself in her room, slips out of the house to a nearby trattoria. But Gianni, considerate as ever, smooths things over, settles disputes over the TV, resists a drunken Marina’s attempts at seduction. Then the women start to bond, reading palms, discussing their lives and loves. The atmosphere becomes joyful and Gianni takes a back seat.
It’s a wonderfully patient, delicately observed film; warm, generous, never for a moment sentimental or patronising, never exploiting dottiness and eccentricity. The performances of the old ladies are pitch-perfect and by the end, Di Gregorio’s casting of himself as Gianni seems both essential and inevitable. The final credits are accompanied by what looks like home movie footage of an improvised dance and, thinking about it afterwards, one can’t be sure whether this is the host dancing with his mother and their guests or the director celebrating with his cast at a wrap party.
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