The first day of my life
Director Paolo Genovese
interpreters Toni Servillo, Margherita Buy, Valerio Mastandrea
Premiere July 6, 2023
Punctuation * *
Starring the inexhaustible Toni Servillo and by one of the most common Italian actresses in recent times, Magherita Buy‘The first day of my life’ responds to a certain idea of Italian auteur and commercial cinema at the same time, being also a fantastic short story raised in a realistic way.
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The starting point is curious. A man, two women and a child with no desire to continue living are presented with the mysterious individual played by Servillo, something like a fallen Angel, or perhaps the tired death in the style of ‘The Three Lights’ by Fritz Lang and ‘The Seventh Seal’ by Ingmar Bergman, but with another style of representation. The individual proposes that they contemplate for a week what would the world be like without them and to see if, in this way, they return to have desire to live.
Director Paolo Genovese part of a novel by himself to weave the relationships between these four characters and their demiurge, and what they expect from a world from which they have wanted to disappear. Some dialogues and situations place us in a somewhat ‘new age’ story, without dark edges, too flat for the moral tensions that several of these characters are supposed to have experienced in a vacuum. The interpreters meet where the script becomes entrenched and loses the fluidity that the initial bars of the film do have about the unfathomable mystery of human existence.