It’s never too late to love – 6 points
AstolfoItaly/France, 2022
Address: Gianni Di Gregorio
Script: Marco Pettenello and Gianni Di Gregorio
Duration: 97 minutes
Performers: Gianni Di Gregorio, Stefania Sandrelli, Alfonso Santagata, Gigio Morra, Andrea Cosentino, Agnese Nano, Mariagrazia Pompei.
Premiere: Available in rooms.
With the persistence of the sea, whose waves end up on the beach invariably, the italian cinema still has one of its trademarks on those comedies of manners that combine the romantic with picaresque satire, where the stereotypes are usually more important than originality and collective identity is imposed on the individual. Like the waves, those comedies too they keep coming regularly to the Río de la Plata, where there seems to be a public willing to enjoy its simplicity. That’s what it’s about It’s never too late to lovestarring Gianni Di Gregorio, who is also responsible for the direction, co-author of the script and who occupied the same roles in the remembered A special holiday (2008), with which it shares many codes.
Astolfo is a retired professor who, forced to leave the apartment where he has lived in Rome for 20 years, has no choice but return to his “country”, in the bowels of Italy. There Astolfo is the last descendant of the founding family of the town and owner of a dilapidated mansion Renaissance. A mansion that seems to have been unoccupied for centuries, where one of the town’s neighbors who lost his house in a divorce has settled. Far from being uncomfortable, the professor shares his large room, which soon begins to be frequented by others. outcastsgiving shape to a community where the popular and a naturally collectivist spirit prevail.
But the happiness of that small clan inevitably collides with the authorities of the place, who view Astolfo’s return with suspicion. And with good reason: the neighboring parish has illegally occupied part of the property, while the mayor built his mansion in what were the surrounding forests, which also belonged to the protagonist’s family. With simplicity and appealing to a tenderness as overloaded as it is anachronistic, It’s never too late to love recover a seventies spirit, when the Italian leftist movements raised their fists against its great enemies, the Church and the liberal State. Of course, it is also a decadent spirit, like the Astolfo mansion, already dismantled by the political dynamics of the 90s, which if here it refers to Menemism, in Italy it evokes the figure of Silvio Berlusconi.
The film includes a romantic subplot which includes the unforgettable Stefania Sandrelli, whose figure is another password that takes us back to those times of Italian cinema, from Monicelli, Bertolucci or Scola to Tinto Brass. The charm of It’s never too late to love. A platform that perhaps makes it possible to ignore the fact that it is an old-fashioned cinema, in which nostalgia weighs more than cinematography, but where there is still a little place for the ghost of some utopia to creep in.
