FRATELLI D’ITALIA

For her second movie as a director (after Miele, already presented at Un Certain Regard), the Italian Valeria Golino composes Euforia, a pop melodrama elegant and touching, on fraternal love.

« Et si tu n’existais pas/Dis-moi pourquoi j’existerais ? / Pour traîner dans un monde sans toi / Sans espoir et sans regret. » The Joe Dassin song enveloping the opening scene could also be a the program of Valeria Golino’s second movie ; Euforia. It’s a story of love and loss, of what we hold back to and what has to be let gone, the lies we tell to reassure others and those we tell ourselves because they look better than the truth. This love is that of two brothers that everything seems to set apart : while Matteo (Riccardo Scarmacio), blazing homo, makes a fortune as an art dealer and lives an excessive life, his older brother Ettore (Valerio Mastrandrea) remains a teacher, trying to keep his head out of the water between his dying marriage and his obligations as a father. He is the one that will die of a cancer but only his younger brother knows it and decides to keep it for himself. As soon as Ettore moves in Matteo’s apartment their lifestyles bind themselves and the rest of the world doesn’t matter anymore. The only thing that matters is this recently found back intimacy, of a unique taste made of powerful affections and subtitle dominations, that only exist in fraternity. Golino’s gets the best out of his actors and finds an seductive equilibrium between formal inventiveness and comprehensibility ; Sorrentino’s influence is never too far. We laugh (the trip to London), we cry (the final starling flight), we are thrilled by the, so Italian, movements of the crowd, but always from the inside, modestly. Right until the last embrace and launching of another marvelous pop song, from Tuxedomoon, that states the journey to acceptation. « In a Manner of speaking/I just want to say/That I could never forget the way/You told me everything. »