Ever since the sixties, when Fellini and Antonioni were filming Monica Vitti and Marcello Mastroianni stroll the stunning stradas, cinema has had a special home in Italy. Though Hollywood’s attempts to recreate that sixties Italian magic have always fallen flat, there’s no denying that the country looks beautiful on the big screen.
Eat Pray Love, Letters to Juliet, To Rome With Love, The Tourist, When In Rome, Nine. All movies of a dubious quality. But when a film is set in Italy, you can’t lose, even if all you do gain is 90 minutes of armchair tourism.
Plot
And so to Lost in Florence, where we meet American football player, Eric (Brett Dalton) and his long-term girlfriend Colleen (Emily Atack), there to visit his cousin Anna (Stana Katic) and her husband Gianni (Marco Bonini). All is well, until Colleen rejects his marriage proposal, and Eric plummets into depression.
Anxious to see his friend get out of his funk, Gianni introduces Eric to the Florentine sport of Calcio Storico (‘historic soccer’), frequently described as one of the most dangerous sports in the world. Basically a combination of basketball and wrestling, there are no rules, and many people get hurt. Eric turns out to have a real aptitude for the game, propelling his team to victory in his first match. But many fans aren’t happy to have an American playing such an Italian game, and things are complicated further by Eric’s burgeoning romance with his captain’s (Alessandro Preziosi) girlfriend Stefania (Alessandra Mastronardi).
Acting and Style
Dalton is well cast as an emotionally-wounded athlete. Oppenheimer is wise to the limitations of his leading man, this being only his second starring role. When he does emote, it’s done inwardly, or in the case of Calcio Storico, pugilistically. Most of the more serious acting is given to the Italian cast, primarily Preziosi and Mastronardi, who handle it with aplomb. Fans of Stana Katic may be disappointed with her scant screen time; at one point she gets her own incongruous montage, as if to say; “Look, Stana Katic is still here!”
Oppenheimer is overly fond of his montages. They take place everywhere, from the Calcio Storico field to the many bars and restaurants of Florence. It’s at these later establishments where the glut is particularly grating. They are so corporate in tone, you half expect one of the characters to turn to the camera and tell you about a half price deal, whilst raising a glass and winking. Other bad stylistic choices include the Instagram filter style vignette on the edges of the dream sequences, which looks distractingly cheap.
Despite these failings, Oppenheimer proves himself to have an eye for spectacle. The Calcio Storico matches are huge events, accompanied by parades and massive audiences, with everyone dressed in grand, medieval garb. Oppenheimer manages to portray the grandeur and importance of these events with an arresting visual panache.
Wish Fullfillment and Easy Rides
There’s an embarrassing amount of male wish-fulfilment underlining the whole venture in Lost in Florence, with uncomfortable touches of the ‘saviour American’. Eric plays one game of Calcio Storico, with Italians who have been playing their whole lives, and suddenly he’s the MVP, and the team finally have a chance of winning the championship. He even has various strangers around the town come up and tell him how good he is. Despite not being visibly more buff than your average leading man, or even his teammates, he rapidly earns the nickname ‘ercole’ (Hercules in Italian).
Then there’s the romance situation. Though his engagement falls through, this setback is almost immediately allayed by the revelation that beautiful Stefania, a woman he didn’t even recognise from their meeting years earlier, has been in love with him since he was a teenager. With no effort, no courting, no chase, he’s got himself a replacement girlfriend.
That everything comes so easy to him makes him hard to root for. You get the feeling that if he were knocked down a peg or too – if Stefania were to choose Paolo, or if Eric were to make a wrong move in Calcio Storico – it might deflate his ego in a way that is ultimately helpful.
Eric’s easy ride impacts upon Lost in Florence’s ability to get its message across. What he learns, after his long-term plans for his career and his relationship go belly up, is to ‘live for the moment’. There’s such a pressure on young people to have their whole lives mapped out; to have five, ten and twenty year plans. There’s no time to smell a rose when you’re trying to make partner in a law firm by the age of thirty.
If it had involved any kind of an effort, Eric’s decision to take things one step at a time could have proved rewarding, even inspirational. But like everything else in Lost in Florence, it comes too easy. When questioned on his birthplace by an Italian sports official unhappy to see an American succeeding at a game so important to her country, he responds ‘Today I’m a Florentine. What does where I was born matter?” But rather than get smacked down for his impertinence, she tacitly agrees. Eric faces so little conflict over the course of this film, it’s a little bit farcical.
Conclusion
Perhaps I’ve been too harsh on Lost in Florence. After all, at its heart, it’s a romantic-comedy; not a genre known for gritty realism. And as a romantic comedy, it largely works. Beautiful people falling in love in a beautiful place. Every so often there’s a laugh. What more do I want, right?
What’s frustrating is that if Oppenheimer had tossed just a couple of challenges in his protagonist’s way, if everything hadn’t gone so consistently smoothly, then this film could have gained enough weight to make it memorable, or even inspiring. As it is, Lost in Florence a passable bit of fluff, nothing more, nothing less. Though you could do worse than spending 90 minutes armchair travelling in Florence.
What’s your favourite film set in Italy?
Lost in Florence comes to on demand on January 27: iTunes, Amazon Video, Google Play, Vudu, Microsoft Movies & TV, Sony PlayStation, and Vimeo.
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