The Best Man (1997)
"Il testimone dello sposo" (original title)

Incredibly, the bride at the altar falls in love with the best man on first sight, and even though he makes efforts to avoid her infatuation with him, she is determined to annul her ... See full summary »

Director:

Pupi Avati

Writer:

Pupi Avati

Stars:

Diego Abatantuono, Inés Sastre, Dario Cantarelli

Nominated for 1 Golden Globe. Another 3 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Diego Abatantuono	...	Angelo Beliossi
Inés Sastre	...	Francesca Babini
Dario Cantarelli	...	Edgardo Osti
Cinzia Mascoli	...	Peppina Campeggi
Valeria D'Obici	...	Olimpia Campeggi Babini
Mario Erpichini	...	Sisto Babini
Ada Maria Serra Zanetti
Ugo Conti	...	Marziano Beliossi
Nini Salerno	...	Sauro Ghinassi
Alessandra Chiti
Carmela Vincenti
Serena Bennato
Marcello Foschini
Barbara Orsani
Umberto Bortolani

Storyline

Incredibly, the bride at the altar falls in love with the best man on first sight, and even though he makes efforts to avoid her infatuation with him, she is determined to annul her marriage and marry the best man. And although she is able to dissolve her marriage, because she has never consummated it, the best man leaves... only to return to her many months later.

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Plot Keywords:

best man | bride | new year's eve | businessman | new year | 

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Taglines:

On her wedding day she was very much in love. Unfortunately, not with the groom.

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Genres:

Comedy | Drama

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG for thematic elements

Details

Country:

Italy

Language:

Italian

Release Date:

21 August 1998 (USA)

Also Known As:

The Best Man

Filming Locations:

Eremo di Tizzano, Casalecchio di Reno, Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Box Office

Opening Weekend:

$8,815 (USA) (14 August 1998)

Gross:

$89,263 (USA) (11 September 1998)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Duea Film, Filmauro

Technical Specs

Runtime:

101 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Connections

Featured in The 55th Annual Golden Globe Awards (1998)

User Reviews

Disappointing, slow, bad dialogues

Hopeful that the New Italian Cinema produced another little gem in its 90's renaissance, went to see this motion picture with high expectations. While the costumes and indoor settings were marvelous, the rest was disappointing.

Some of the dialogues made little sense, or were artificially forced on the actor's mouth. The acting didn't see spontaneous, and some of the characters just seemed to make little sense. Another big disappointment was the dubbing of dialogues that clearly didn't follow the actor's lips: listening to mono-tone reading of dialogue text, and watching the lips simply not sinchronized to the listened voice, just makes this movie a turn-off. This movie reminded me of some of the made-for-TV productions of RAI-TV that catered to a domestic forced-fed audience when RAI was the only TV station in the entire country twenty years ago, and the audience had no other choice but to watch the only show in town. In its defense, there were some interesting moments in the plot, like the slide show shown to the italian audience, of pictures of America. But at the end, this movie was like reading a book whose turn-paging incentive is to find out when things were finally happening, only to find out at the end that the climatic moment never happened. Very anti-climatic.