Flirtations with Italian cinema history

As we've made our first real exploration of Italy -- I'd been here in 1994, but only in the far north to go skiing, and this is my wife's first time setting foot in the country -- we've expected to become reacquainted with our impression of Italy from the movies. 

In Venice, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now was invoked multiple times. As I'm writing this, we have not yet been to Rome, but we're already talking about a visit to the Trevi Fountain, because that's where Anita Ekberg frolicked in La Dolce Vita. (I had been saying it was Brigitte Bardot. Oops.) Perhaps more relevant to me personally, I will be on the lookout for scenes from Roman Holiday.  

What we were not expecting was what we found in the town of Arezzo in Tuscany, where we spent Tuesday night, chosen only for its relative equidistance between Venice and Rome. 

The town has the old buildings and piazzas to make it sort of the platonic ideal of a "small" Italian town. Small by the standards of Venice and Rome, anyway.

That must have been just what the producers of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful thought, which is why they chose to shoot the opening section of the film here.

Throughout the town you see little plaques like the one I've included above. I should say, we saw three of them. I assume there are only as many plaques as there are Arezzo locations that are recognizeable from the film. I recognized these specific locations only in the vaguest sense, having rewatched the movie as recently as five years ago, but still not having the familiarity necessary for full recall. 

However, the idea of the Italian piazza -- in movies ranging from Suspiria to Cinema Paradiso to the aforementioned films of Federico Fellini -- has been fully established for us, meaning the familiarity feels strong.

And then we discovered the view. 

We ascended to what we thought was Arezzo's highest point to look at a medieval cathedral, and then noticed the park beyond that. Which -- very casually, it seem to us -- had this view:

I know this doesn't even really convey it, but it's the best I've got without including members of my family.

So at this point I inevitably thought of a different sort of film set in Italy, the sun-drenched romantic films such as Under the Tuscan Sun, if you want a movie I haven't actually seen, or La Dolce Villa, not to be confused with La Dolce Vita, which I saw earlier this year, if you want films I have seen. And though I can't name them at the moment, I've seen a lot of films like this, travelogues with a lot of food porn at their center. 

So I guess I am reaching the following not very interesting point: I've seen a lot of depictions of Italy on film, and being in Italy proves that these films were actually shot on location?

Two other quick general thoughts about Italy in terms of its role in film:

1) When we were making our way through the rabbit warren of Venetian streets, I found myself wondering where they showed the films in the Venice Film Festival. There was not a single place I saw that I recognized as a likely, or even potential, screening area.

2) In Arezzo I ended up wearing my "The Good, The Bad and The Wookie (sic)" shirt, which you can see below, which I thought was appropriate as it invokes spaghetti western master and revered Italian director Sergio Leone.

Oh and here's another panorama image of Arezzo, just because:

Accelerated parenting coincidences

Sick day #3. 

Or is it #4? Does Thursday night count?

Anyway, yesterday was the day I got tried of long form content. I watched as much baseball as I possibly could, and then three more movies. My cold (not COVID) has progressed from nose to throat today, in terms of the location of the phlegm, and some coughing. I'm pretty sick of it and it remains to be seen how many movies I feel like I can watch today. I'd really like to get out -- I'm rubbing Ben Gay on my lower back, which hurts from lying all day on, and then sleeping on, the couch in our garage -- but I'm just not up to it.

And of course there were more coincidences.

The one I'm going to tell you about today stretched from my last movie on Friday night to my first movie on Saturday afternoon.

"But Vance," you ask, "Certainly with that kind of gap, you must have had the themes of Friday night's movie in your head when you chose the first movie to watch on Saturday afternoon, at like 3:30 after all the day's baseball was done?"

No. 

And besides, one of the worst movies I've seen this year -- Netflix's Fear Street: Prom Queen -- was jammed between these two, watched partially on Friday night and finished Saturday morning. 

There are no coincidences involving Fear Street: Prom Queen. 

Fleur Fortune's The Assessment and Sean Anders' Instant Family were on two different streaming services, Amazon and Netflix respectively. The first had been on my radar for more than a week as a promising option to add to my 2025 in-progress rankings, and it turned out to be. The second was just from what has been my go-to for this sick period, selecting from "comedy movies" on Netflix.

But both movies were about a couple needing to rapidly develop parenting skills, due to being responsible for kids they didn't have just a few days earlier.

The intriguing concept of The Assessment is that a future couple, living on an isolated island that may not be on planet Earth, has to undergo a week-long assessment by an external assessor if they want the government's okay for them to have children. The couple are played by Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel, their assessor by Alicia Vikander.

They think this is going to be a standard series of questions about their fitness for parenting, checking of their house for safety hazards, that sort of thing. But that sort of thing doesn't take a week.

Instead, on day 2, Vikander's Virginia begins acting like a child. She doesn't tell them that this is what she's doing, but they catch on pretty quick when suddenly she's no longer a prim and proper bureaucrat who seems like she might have stepped out of the world of The Handmaid's Tale, but instead a screaming, crying child who pushes every boundary they can imagine to see how they will handle it. It's a great concept and it plays out in satisfying form.

The circumstances of Instant Family are a little different, but they also involve a previously childless couple being thrust into the intense rigors of parenting to see how they will handle it. And it is essentially also a timed trial period.

Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne play a couple who had never had children, by choice, but have started wondering if something is missing from their lives. Instead of going through the standard process of conceiving children, he makes a joke about adopting a couple kids in order for them to move into a house they want to renovate but that is too big for them. Something lodges in her mind, though, and before long they've accepted foster parenting responsibilities for a 15-year-old girl (Isabela Merced) and her two younger siblings (Gustavo Escobar and Julianna Gamiz).

Instead of needing an external assessor to simulate the overwhelming experience of children and the variety of types of problems they present at different ages, the pair gets three children with built-in damage from the fact that they never had a known father and that their drug addicted mother went to prison. And many of the same sorts of disasters result as in The Assessment ... though the different genres of the two movies suggest that the outcomes might be a bit different. 

Just so I don't have to write it as a different post, I thought I would leave you with one bonus coincidence that also comes from Instant Family and from the next movie I watched, La Dolce Villa. (This last, though not bad, might have been the one that finally wore me out.)

When I started watching La Dolce Villa, I thought I might have a bigger coincidence on my hands than the one I'm going to tell you about. In addition to Felicity alum Scott Foley, who was good to see again, the movie stars a young actress who I thought was also Isabela Merced. It's actually a young actress by the name of Maia Reficco, but if you look at them side by side, I think you can see where the sense of deja vu came from. (They are about exactly a year apart in age, and Google does autocomplete their names together, so obviously this has been searched before by others.)

This is Isabela, followed by Maia:

The bonus coincidence would still be a coincidence even if they did not look alike.

In both Instant Family and La Dolce Villa, their characters don safety glasses and are invited to participate in the demolishing of a house, which they do with gusto, using a sledgehammer. 

The circumstances are a bit different. For Merced's character, it's a way to get out a life's worth of frustrations, an alternative to the previously unproductive ways she's been acting out. For Reficco's character, it's beginning the renovation of the house she's bought in a small Italian town for one euro, in hopes of turning it into a cooking school. 

But the image of both of these doppelgangers wearing safety glasses and taking out chunks of walls and cabinetry with sledgehammers, not an hour apart, was pretty surreal for me, I must say. 

Incidentally, this was not the only identity confusion I had about Isabela Merced. When this actress first came on my radar, it was in Transformers: The Last Knight, a year before Instant Family came out, and there she was referred to as Isabela Moner. When I looked her up now, she's in IMDB as Isabela Merced. I thought I'd made a mistake in my Transformers review and was even going to go so far as to fix it, but then I noticed she's undergone a change in the way she's professionally credited -- which I hope is not the result of any real-world issues with her real-world biological parents.