THE SALT OF LIFE
Director:
Gianni di Gregorio
Cast: Alfonso Santagata, Gianni di Gregorio, Valeria Cavalli,
Valeria de Franciscis
In Mid-August Lunch, Di Gregorio was
single and lived with Valeria; in The Salt of Life he is married, with a stroppy
daughter, and paranoid that his increasingly erratic mother is blowing all the
family money on expensive food and extravagant gift giving. (Indeed, the opening
scene sees Gianni attempt to foist a power-of-attorney on her, but is too sappy
to actually pull it off).
But Di Gregorio's central concern
here is the romantic life of his screen alter-ego: his feminised existence, as
nursemaid to his mother and house-husband to a not-especially-sympathetic wife,
is jolted out of its torpor when he notices the voluptuous home help employed
by his mother. (Never is Di Gregorio's distinct resemblance to Robert Mitchum
more ironic as he drunkenly tries to put his feeble moves on her.) Still, it awakens
some long-buried desire to assert his masculinity, a desire only amplified by
the sense that all the other ancient gents around him are snaring beautiful young
things left, right and centre; and Gianni tries his polite, utterly gracious best
to generate some kind of love life. He looks up old girlfriends, suffers the ambiguous
attentions of his party-girl neighbour and, in one hilariously painful sequence,
finds himself on a double-date with blonde identical twins.
This,
of course, is material that in other hands could simply become toe-curling middle-aged
leching, but Di Gregorio navigates his film with such a sense of delicacy that
its tone is never coarsened. In some ways, The Salt of Life examines the other
side of the coin, acting a comment on the sexualised nature of Berlusconi's Italy,
where women are routinely encouraged to use their looks as a social bargaining
chip. Be that as it may, Di Gregorio's film manages to be as charming as Mid-August
Lunch; a tremendous achievement.
IN CINEMAS DECEMBER
22
