The Hummingbird

Great actors and a very good director aren't enough to have a great film. The plot is complex but trivial and confused, there are emotional elements but in the end nothing remains. You will forget this film, your mind will confuse with too many others Italian films.

What was the purpose of Francesca Archibugi? Reflecting on death, tragedies, friendships, parenting, brotherhood, gambling, siblings or love?

Pierfrancesco Favino, Laura Morante, Kasia Smutniak, Nanni Moretti, Massimo Ceccherini: fantastic actors that play their usual roles. Hopefully (some of) the characters in Veronesi's novel are better deepened as well as some of the themes.

This is evidently based on an Italian best seller, which I haven't read. Maybe if I had, I could have made more sense of this movie, which I saw in Italian with French subtitles. Maybe if the subtitles had be readable I would have made more sense of it as well, but I couldn't, because they were white against an often light or white background, as is generally the case, which means that sometimes they just disappeared.

Maybe I would have understood this movie better if there hadn't been so many characters and so many time shifts.

Maybe all of these things, but since none of them came to be for me, I had problems, real problems, keeping track of everything that was going on.

I did admire how the makeup artists aged the characters.

But I would suggest reading the novel before seeing this movie.

The film is based on a Veronesi 's book, the story follow the entire life of a man from he was a boy untill get old.

The man, played by amazing Favino, withstand the dramas big and small, of his life and go on. It seems impossible believe how the human being can resist to sufferings that he meets without loose control of himself and found also some reason to be still happy.

The thing is that anyway you can't always fighting at certain point you have to accept the reality and make your own decision, it's a kind of romantic choise where you became almost a supererhero as well.

I strongly suggest it.

There is one thing I did like in this film: the complete freedom it takes with the representation of time. One sequence that starts in the 00s can end in the 70s, or the other way round, or it may span several temporal plans. It deliberately plays with our concept of filmic present time: it's hard to tell what is flashback, what is "now" and what is flash-forward. Given it represents the inner life of a single individual, and his family and friends, it seems a courageous and appropriate stance to take.

But... this is a turgid, empty drama, with a body count that is truly massive for a film that doesn't deal with war or terrorism. It's like a long episode of Eastenders, but in Italy and with a lot of dosh. I know that it is extremely faithful to the original novel; if I didn't know that, I would guess that the author made a film about the life story of a very unlucky rich man, then realised she had made a crushing bore of a film, so instead put all the shots in a randomiser, and gave it a good shake in the hope of coming up with something better. Which it does... somewhat.

In the end, what is left? I would have to gesticulate and hum and moan my disappointment, it's really quite hard to put it into words. Even my beloved Moretti can't salvage his fairly pointless character. Why Italian cinema seems to revel in giving us stories so geared towards triggering random emotions, without even a nod of acknowledgment to the brain of the unfortunate viewer?