Interview. Daniele Luchetti.

"What makes My Brother Is an Only Child so alive and entertaining is how it dramatizes the endless tug-of-war between political conviction and personal experience - the way the lines twist and blur and finally implode," writes New York's David Edelstein.

"In a way, I wanted to describe a thoughtful way of handling politics," director Daniele Luchetti tells James Van Maanen in an interview at the main site. "While I am totally against ideology as such, I am pro-politics."

Updated through 3/30.

"The film tradition Luchetti evokes includes Fellini (the boy's parents bicker but also display unique personalities) as well as Bertolucci (both brothers are entranced by the lovely, half-French Francesca played by Diane Fleri)," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Also discernible are nods to Bellocchio (the family's fears for Accio's sanity result in comic hostilities) and Pasolini (the boys' politics reflect a compulsion similar to sexuality). Luchetti's narrative spans a decade but does so concisely by building on those cinematic antecedents."

"[E]ven when the narrative veers toward violence or grief, Mr Luchetti's manner is breezy and raffish," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "He seems to be aiming for the in-the-moment, open-ended aesthetic - the breathlessness - that characterized the youthful Italian films of the late 60s and early 70s, movies like Marco Bellocchio's Fists in the Pocket and China Is Near. The problem is that the director's effort to breathe immediacy and urgency into stories of that eventful era lends My Brother Is an Only Child an inevitable air of nostalgia. The absence of perspective that gives the film its antic rhythm - we are so close to the characters that we can't see past them - also feels somewhat evasive."

"Unlike Louis Malle's great Lacombe Lucien, which laconically expresses how innocence is easily and cunningly gripped by fascism, Luchetti's characters already have dug their boots in the dirt by the time the film commences, with Accio [Elio Germano] sympathetic to the fascist cause and his entire family emboldened by communism," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "His name recalls Accatone and his mouth is as dirty as Mamma Roma's, but My Brother Is an Only Child eschews the grit and pathos of Pasolini's post-neorealist classics, settling instead for cuteness."

But for Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, this is "a grand entertainment that seems to pack in all the major themes of postwar European film and literature. We've got a working-class family, a misunderstood young man, communism and fascism, the Sexual Revolution, the student uprisings and their subsequent decay into paranoid revolutionary violence. All that, plus a couple of handsome leading men and a hilarious rewrite of the lyrics to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (i.e., Schiller's 'Ode to Joy') so it's about Lenin, Trotsky and Mao."

"If expectedly cynical about junior black-shirt hooliganism, Daniele Luchetti's film is also ambivalent about how piggishness takes the guise of 'free love' among the left," notes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update: "Despite its pedigree, My Brother Is an Only Child isn't in the same league as The Best of Youth, a brazenly unfair comparison if ever I've made one," writes Phil Nugent in ScreenGrab. "But on its own more modest terms it's smart and affecting, with the conflicts of years ago treated with all the wisdom of hindsight but a minimum of sentimentality.... Part of the charm of the movie, as with other Italian films such as The Best of Youth and Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night, is that it carries the reassuring message that America isn't the only country that can't seem to get past arguing who was driven crazier by the 60s."

Update, 3/30: "If the formal tropes are not those of classical melodrama - Luchetti's film is all run-and-gun handheld camerawork and jump cuts - then the sentiment is, with its sun-splashed, pictorial lighting and quick, easy lapses into Franco Piersanti's romantic score and some expertly chosen vintage pop," writes Brendon Bouzard in Reverse Shot. "Though its scope was obviously larger, The Best of Youth proves an instructive comparative text - where that film is magnificent for refusing to allow its politically active characters to serve as emblems of some sort of Hegelian dialectic, My Brother is so disinterested in interrogating the political and social subtleties of its era that its characters feel like bullet points on a Wikipedia page."

Posted by dwhudson at March 28, 2008 4:29 AM