Interview. Silvio Soldini.

"A perceptively written, finely-played exploration of a fundamentally good marriage during an unanticipated bad patch, Silvio Soldini's Days and Clouds is an absorbing, deliberate drama about choices and commitment," wrote Eddie Cockrell in Variety from last September's Toronto International Film Festival.

"Where so many films about domestic stress descend into staginess and flat-out caricature, Days and Clouds presents us with recognizably flawed people, who happen to be flawlessly inhabited by stars Margherita Buy (a vision of fraying elegance) and Antonio Albanese (a portrait of dignity in reverse)," wrote Adam Nayman in Eye Weekly.

Days and Clouds opens in New York on Friday, and James Van Maanen nabbed a quick talk with Soldini during this year's Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series.

Updated through 7/11.

Update, 7/9: "Falling down a social class and abandoning your entire lifestyle sucks; still, this particular freelancer has trouble working up too much sympathy for a couple selling a Genoa loft and moving into a solid if blockish apartment," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice. "The search for a better recent movie about unemployment and self-effacement than Laurent Cantet's 2001 Time Out continues."

Similarly, Henry Stewart in the L Magazine: "Forced to sell their house, they suffer the injury of moving into a modest apartment. It looks a lot nicer than mine."

At indieWIRE, Kristi Mitsuda finds the ending "smacks falsely when rubbed up against the tough times Days and Clouds sometimes seriously portrays."

Update, 7/10: In Michele's (Antonio Albanese) withholding of information from Elsa (Margherita Buy), Simon Abrams, writing in the New York Press finds an "emotional dishonesty... indicative of the worst trend in the new wave of Italian neo-realism, where economic recession and familial malaise is reduced to cheap soap operatics with an allegorical twist. They transform serious socially relevant problems into trite domestic fairy tales. As a result, loaded scenarios are confused for sincere social probing and a protracted non-resolution is substituted for a real answer."

Updates, 7/11: "[T]his film - unlike its forerunner [Bread and Tulips], which was set in Venice - is unblinkingly realistic," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Genoa, with its narrow streets and quiet harbor, has none of the hallmarks of a glamorous international destination."

"Soldini's main interest is in the politics of marriage," writes Sam Adams at the AV Club. "Buy and Albanese try to support each other, but the fear of financial ruin sets them at each other's throats as often as not. The movie doesn't judge their actions, or excuse them. It just allows the details of their relationship to accumulate until they feel less like characters, and more like people you've known for years."

More from Martin Tsai in the New York Sun.

Posted by dwhudson at July 8, 2008 1:01 PM