The last time I did a film challenge like this, I generally watched three movies over the weekend then did some write-ups to go up the following Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Normally, I would have done the same thing again. One of the things I was looking forward to with the Stacker list was there were a number of films I wasn’t at all familiar with that I would be getting to see for the first time. That included this entry, The Best of Youth. However, this one would be a wee bit more of a challenge than most.
Back in 2018 when I did the AFI Countdown, I just had to use some basic searches to find out where the different films could be found. Some I had on DVD. Others were streaming on a service I subscribed to. Still others I would need to either buy a DVD or a digital copy or do some kind of rental based on what I saw as the best deal. These days, I have the Just Watch app on my iPad and lot more streaming services I can access. That actually made The Best of Youth a little more challenging because, well, I had three options:
- Buy a $40 DVD off Amazon
- Rent for about $6 or so off Amazon Digital
- Buy a digital copy off Amazon for about $16
I opted for #3. Why? Simple: The Best of Youth is a full six hours and seven minutes long. An Amazon rental would need to be watched in 48 hours once I started it, and I strongly suspected I would not be watching the full movie in one sitting. I mean, even the Snydercut of Justice League only ran for four. Six was really pushing it, and I didn’t have any other options. No, the film was not available on iTunes or anywhere else. However, having seen the film now, I don’t really regret the purchase even though I suspect I will never watch it again.
The Best of Youth follows, for most of its runtime, two Italian brothers starting in 1966 and running through to 2003. At the start of the film, Matteo Carati (Alessio Boni) comes across as a serious-minded young college student studying literature. His father Angelo (Andrea Tidona) interrupts to ask for some help, but Matteo declines and says he needs to study. Angelo suggests his son is brilliant because of an essay published in a newspaper when the young man was in high school. Instead, Angelo goes off to ask Matteo’s brother Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio). Nicola is studying medicine, and he comes across as much more easygoing and willing to help. Oh, and Angelo got him a skeleton for anatomy lessons. In one short scene, I learned more or less everything I needed to know about Matteo and Nicola, and to a certain extent Angelo. They’re vaguely middle class. Matteo is very uptight and serious. Nicola takes life as it comes and seems to enjoy himself more as a result.
That said, the brothers are close even as their lives diverge over the course of the film. As for the film itself, it doesn’t really have a concrete plot. It’s the story of the Caratis, most notably the two brothers, but also saving time for Angelo, the boys’ mother Adriana (Adriana Asti), their older sister Giovanna (Andrea Tidona), and their younger sister Francesca (Valentina Carnelutti when she’s grown up, Nila Carnelutt as a child). There’s also time given to the brothers’ friends, one of whom eventually marries Francesca, and various love interests and eventually the brothers’ own children. Most notably is Giorgia (Jasmine Trinca), a young woman the brothers find in a mental hospital where it appears she is being abused. Giorgia does have legitimate mental issues, but the whole point to her is, in part, to show just how poorly the Italian mental health system treated people like her and how the brothers react to her abuse, said abuse mostly appearing in the form of electroshock therapy.
Side note: electroshock therapy is, today, considered a legitimate therapy for a lot of mental health issues, most notably depression, but that probably wasn’t the view in 1966.
Regardless, the brothers decide to take Giorgia home to her family before heading off to a long promised vacation in Norway. Nicola has just passed his exams, getting an “A” in part because his professor felt he demonstrated the intangible quality of empathy for others while Matteo just walked out of his oral exams after his tester questioned his general knowledge in a harsh way. The trip to take Giorgia home does not go as planned as her family wants her sent back to the Institute. Matteo, more impulsively, turns around and joins the army. Nicola continues on to Norway and enjoys spending time with counterculture types before returning to Italy and eventually becoming a psychiatrist with a mission to actually improve the lives of people like Giorgia. Matteo, on the other hand, ends up becoming a cop, and even as I know very little about Italian history of the last fifty years, it would seem that they had some similar counterculture vs cops sort of stuff in the 60s and 70s as happened in the United States, only it looks like it might have gotten a bit more extreme. While Matteo and Nicola’s being on opposite sides doesn’t really affect their relationship, it does cause problems when Nicola meets and eventually has a daughter with crusading classmate Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco), though that appears to be limited to Giulia and Matteo’s not really getting along very well, and even then, it’s more quiet than anything else.
Yeah, for a six hour film, I don’t think there’s much of a conflict here. Arguably, two things make the film what it is in terms of plot, and both happen in if not the second half than at least close to it. The first is Giulia’s abandoning Nicola and their daughter Sara to join a communist terrorist group, and the second is Matteo’s suicide about three quarters of the way through. Matteo had briefly had a relationship with an aspiring photographer/librarian named Mirella (Maya Sansa), one that resulted in a son Matteo never met or even knew about. The film actually ends with Mirella and Nicola apparently getting married and that son, a young man who is the son of both brothers, one through biology and one through marriage, retracing Nicola’s steps and going to Norway but then finding his own way up there.
That may be the best way to look at The Cost of Youth. The different characters all grow up, have kids, and make mistakes while trying to do right by the world around them. It’s a simple movie on many levels, one that doesn’t really go for fancy things like recasting the characters (aside from the ones that first appear in the movie as children), and even the one moment that some fancy special effects might have been used opted not to. That moment came in the scene pictured directly above this paragraph. Mirella and Nicola are taking a leisurely, if silent, walk through the countryside late in the film when the deceased Matteo joins them and walks between and behind them for a minute, suggesting that he’s sort of standing between the two despite the fact the film has made it clear there’s something between them. Matteo and Mirella broke up well before they had been together for very long, and Nicola and Giulia never quite tied the knot, particularly since she spent time in prison. After a moment or two, during which the three say nothing, Matteo stops, turns, and walks away, going in the opposite direction. At no point does he fade from view except through simple distance. Director Marco Tullio Giordana could have easily done something to make Matteo disappear, even simply getting the actor to quickly duck behind a tree or into the bushes when the other two momentarily block him from view, but that never happens, and once Matteo finally disappears from view by walking around a bend, then and only then do Nicola and Mirella embrace. It’s a simple moment done very well, and arguably the one really “fantastic” element of the entire film.
So, despite the fact this film acts more as a generational character study, showing how the events of 1966 influenced both brothers for the next few decades, I can’t help but find myself really loving and appreciating it. My general experience with Italian cinema tends to run the gamut from art house treasures to horrifying horror films to blatant rip-offs of popular American blockbusters, but this one struck me at the most “Italian” in terms of the culture on display. I could be very wrong–I’m not the slightest bit Italian–but that was the feel I had, and Stacker’s very brief synopsis of the film simply says that it is of a certain type of Italian story that tells a multi-generational tale. Stacker listed two more, one of which will be appearing later on, but it does strike me that there is an American take on that in the form of the collected Godfather movies. In this case, it sure is nice to see that multi-generational Italian story where there’s a family who aren’t members of a crime family.
NEXT: I got in some Italian cinema, so up next I’m getting something Taiwanese. Come back next week for the family drama Yi Yi.
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