Starring: Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessio Boni, Maya Sansa
Director: Marco Tullio Giordana
The film: This is family drama at its best - clear, graceful and engaging. Peppered with vivid characters and melodramatic moments, The Best of Youth (despite a daunting six hours' duration) resembles a rich epic novel that grows in your memory.
The movie, written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, follows an Italian family from the 1960s to today. It's a bit slow at the beginning, but once you reach the point where the two young brothers Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo (Alessio Boni) try to rescue a tortured girl from a barbaric asylum, you won't want to stop watching.
Inspired by the incident, Nicola becomes a psychiatrist, while Matteo joins the army and then the police force. The brothers, who have distinctly different characters, go their separate ways, occasionally crossing each other's paths due to tumultuous events that mark the turn of contemporary Italian history and its impact on their family, which includes two sisters, an endearing mother and a lively father.
Linking the stories are the relationships between Nicola and his girlfriend, Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco), a music student who turns radical and leaves the family to join the Red Brigade, and Matteo's brief and heart-breaking romance with Mirella (Maya Sansa), a Sicilian photographer.