"The Best of Youth" - a six hour film in two parts has(some might say,
finally) arrived in San Francisco at the Balboa Theater. Made in 2003 (I
believe) - it's a generational "wrencher". A family with branches of all
shades, it starts in the Sixties and concludes in 2002. When I stood up at
the end of the second part and looked at the packed audience, it seemed most
of us were over fifty, and various shadows of each other's youth. Italian,
originally commissioned for TV, the work is both elegy and restoration - if
audience can be defined as harp, this one does not miss a string - deep
mental disturbance, political extremes, single fathers, identity conflicted
mothers, idealism gone diversely amok, brothers and sisters both in harmony
and odds, love won, lost, screwed up - an amazing resonant range. With the
exception of issues of ethnicity and race (which would be required of any
film of similar magnitude in the USA) "The Best of Youth" gets to the bases.
If narrative is dead, this is a very good death. (Poetry even manages to
play a small part, too.)
Stephen V
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