Starring: Silvio Muccino, Jasmine Trinca and Margherita Buy (Italian with English subtitles)
Director: Directed by Giovanni Veronesi
Rated: M
THE Manual of Love was Italy’s number one box office hit for 2005.
The Italian cinema knows how to play to its audience, reinforcing its own national stereotypes.
In a sense this is a classic Italian film, all about finding love, losing love and going after forbidden love.
This film claims to chronicle the phases of being in love. It is in four parts: “Falling in Love”, “The Crisis”, “The Betrayal” and “The Abandonment”.
It is, by our standards, a rather bleak assessment.
To illustrate each phase we follow four stories that, generally, only intersect indirectly.
Tommaso (Silvio Muccino) falls head over heels with Giulia (Jasmine Trinca).
He stalks her until she goes out with him, and he can convince her to take his proposal for marriage seriously. I wondered why she bothered.
After an initially happy marriage Barbara (Margherita Buy) and Marco (Sergio Rubini) experience a major crisis in their relationship.
They take each other for granted and Barbara is bored.
She thinks a child will help them overcome the staleness of their relationship. Poor kid!
Ornella (Luciana Littizzetto) discovers that her husband has betrayed her, and so, after a good deal of man hating, she launches into an affair, which is expected to make her happy. It doesn’t, and she comes full circle.
Goffredo (Carlo Verdone) is a pediatrician who discovers his wife is having an affair and is abandoning their marriage.
He is devastated and wonders whether life is worth living.
He buys a book The Manual of Love, which gives him hope. At last a happy story.
For a Catholic country which values the family, contemporary Italian cinema makes one film after another about love-sick Italians who are desperate to get married, and then can’t wait to bust them up by having sexual affairs with other people.
I wondered about the phases of being in love that this film left out – sacrifice, being faithful, enjoying children and growing old together with dignity and grace.
The Manual of Love is witty in a very few parts, but generally tedious, too long for this material and a profile of life’s losers looking anywhere but within themselves for the cause of their own unhappiness.
