Arriving on our screens this Wednesday after a very good and unexpected success in Italy – more than 2 million spectators, the biggest score for a local film at the transalpine box office for more than a year -, “Follemente(e)” is a daring romantic comedy as its story proves to be as surprising as it is hilarious. The feature film begins like a classic romance, with the first meeting of a forty-year-old and a thirty-year-old, Piero and Lara, in the latter’s Roman apartment.
Only now, while their conversation in seduction mode progresses, strange guests join in the debate. There are eight of them, four women in Lara’s camp, as many men in Piero’s. They do not exist in real life, but in the minds of the two protagonists: they are their emotions, which exchange in the heart of living rooms in their image, grayish and cluttered for him, colorful and very feminine for her.
And, while Piero and Lara gradually evolve their romantic dialogue, these personified emotions will constantly comment on each sentence, pause, projection, error, thought, reflection or foreplay of the duo. We quickly think of the process created by Pete Docter for his animated saga “Vice Versa”, with two important nuances. Here, it is not raw emotions like joy or anger that come into play, but profiles such as the transfixed lover or the intellectual for him, the romantic or the not shy seductress for her. Above all, these are not graphic creations, but real actors who embody them.
Top actors
Wouldn’t all this be an old-fashioned cliché? No, because classic profiles such as the macho in Piero are opposed by modern incarnations like the feminist for her. Result: on both sides of these mental representations, the discussions which are going well become heated, regularly turning into conflict, even verbal carnage. The fact that they are remarkably written, in a spirit of high-level comedy, creates a powerfully comic effect for the spectator, while proving tender and clever.
We also owe this hyper result to the actors. If he chose his loving couple very well with the formidable Pilar Fogliati (Lara) and Edoardo Leo (Piero), the director of “Follement(e)”, Paolo Genovese, recruited the cream of Italian supporting actors to slip into the skin of the emotional profiles of each, all dear to the heart of the transalpine public, and unleashed for the occasion.
We cannot name them all, but fans of Italian cinema will recognize in particular the remarkable Claudia Pandolfi, who excels in “reasonable” but doubting female emotion, the veteran Marco Giallini, impeccable as the lesson-giving “Professor”, and the astonishing Claudio Santamaria, who delivers a phenomenal number as a macho man wanting to force Piero to constantly pounce on Lara without any other form of foreplay.
In the end, we laugh a lot, we are also under the spell, both of the main couple and of their mischievous emotions… And for those who wonder if all these little people end up breaking the ice and “finishing” in Lara’s room, just one piece of advice: go and see this very original comedy!
Editor’s rating: 4/5
“Crazily”Italian romantic comedy by Paolo Genovese, with Edoardo Leo, Pilar Fogliati, Claudia Pandolfi, Claudio Santamaria, Marco Giallini… 1 h 37.