IL CAPITALE UMANO (2013)

In his too-clever-by-half financial morality play, Paolo Virzi’s award-collecting film jars right from its initial misguided move from the East Coast USA of Stephen Amidon’s novel to Milan & environs. At first, it plays like an updated early-‘60s social satire of Il Boom, the post-WWII economic ‘miracle’ that proved unsustainable. At their best when Alberto Sordi was cast as an overextended middle-class businessman, trying to leverage iffy loans into the big time. A scenario revived here for Fabrizio Bentivoglio, a real-estate agent who gets in over his head with slick hedge-funder Fabrizio Gifuni. Virzi serves up tennis for the men, and a romance between their kids as the tie that binds, but without Sordi’s verve & comic attack (plus the stylistic abstraction of b&w cinematography), it’s a hard connection to swallow on any level. Things greatly improve in the following three chapters as events (financial crisis, infidelity, high school breakups, drinking) refract on the film’s prologue of a shadowy driving accident injuring an anonymous bicyclist. All cleverly laid out in crisscrossed perspectives from different parties to the events. (Less clever the barefaced planting of clues to keep the plot in gear.) The structural influence of Asghar Farhadi far superior A SEPARATION/’11, out two years previously, is obvious. But where that film’s shifting perspectives kept revealing more of characters you grew to know as family, here the technique is forced on the material with Virzi, navigating from Stateside to Italian cultures, always outside character & events.*  Certainly worth a look, mostly for meeting up with a fine cast of actors.  (As the rich, unfulfilled wife, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is primus inter pares, while only an over-parted Bentivoglio, in the Sordi spot, disappoints.) But something self-congratulatory hangs over the film.

DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, A SEPARATION. This film follows its template, but lands closer to the pretentious crisscrossed-fate fare of BABEL/’06 or CRASH/’04.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *To see what’s missing elsewhere, try the film’s funniest/meanest scene where our rich, rich wife holds an initial meeting with an OTT advisory board she’s selected to help organize the pet project Theatre Restoration she hopes to get off the ground.  The situation reeks of real-life experience.