Black & White World

Verso sera (Towards Evening - 1991)

You ever have one of those experiences where you’re watching a movie, and you’re kind of hanging in there because you’re pretty sure the good part is coming?  It’s not that the movie is boring, necessarily, but it just feels like it’s leading somewhere and the payoff is going to be worth it.  And then it never really gets there, or when it does there’s no payoff?

Towards Evening is that kind of movie, unfortunately.  It was a year in the life of these characters, and though the narration at the beginning indicated that this would be the “happiest, and saddest, year” of this character’s life, I didn’t see much of the happiness or the sadness.  It was mostly a movie about the generation gap, which doesn’t seem like anything urgent enough to make a movie about, frankly.

Marcello Mastroianni (ah, now we see the reason I rented it in the first place) was good, but I much preferred his scenes with the little girl, Lara Pranzoni, and after about the midway point they didn’t have much together.  When the movie was over it didn’t feel like anyone had learned much or had done much growing, including me.