Gabriele Muccino is a commercially minded Italian director with a foothold in Hollywood, and I have a soft spot for his emotional drama The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), starring Will Smith as the single dad trying to pull himself up out of poverty by his bootstraps.
There’s a fair bit of sugar in the mix here. His new movie (in the Cinema del Giardino sidebar) is a coming-of-age story about a lonely, intense Italian teen called Marco (Brando Paccito) who uses the payout following a motor scooter accident to fund the summer holiday of a lifetime in San Francisco. The snag is that he finds himself having to go with Maria (Matilda Lutz), an uptight princessy type from his school whose homophobic attitudes come out into the open when she realises that their genially welcoming hosts Matt (Taylor Frey) and Paul (Joseph Haro) are gay. But, of course, the relations between them and their emotional quadrangle become complicated – and then a little more complicated still in the coda section set in New York.
The movie is never as predictable as it could have been in other hands – and certainly more unpredictable than many another coming-of-ager, a genre that can be pretty tiresome. The extended flashback scene in which Matt and Paul reveal how they got together in New Orleans is rather gripping in its melodramatic way: Matt was originally dating Paul’s sister, a situation that leads to a grisly confrontation with his parents.
Saccharine and slightly preposterous, but fluent and watchable.
