Misunderstood

Misunderstood

Incompreso (Vita col figlio)

Director ~ Luigi Comencini

Writers ~ Florence Montgomery, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi

1966, Italy

Stars ~ Anthony Quayle, Stefano Colagrande, Simone Giannozzi

 

A weepy that benefits tremendously from its villa and river settings, from Armando Nannuzzi’s cinematography. There’s a lush summer melancholy that European bildungsromans provide effortlessly.

Mother has died, but Father decides to tell his eldest son to keep it a secret from the sickly younger son, so there is a lot of repressed and unprocessed grief against sun-drenched Florence. Father (Anthony Quayle, dubbed) is a consul, often away and emotionally distant, leaving his son Andrea to flounder around the villa, his obligations and grief without much supervision, and always in the orbit of his younger brother’s apparent sickliness. As Andrea, Stefano Colagrande impresses as our protagonist with an unforced charm, one where the logic of his actions is thoroughly believable. In fact, despite its premise and aim, sentiment is low key and the feel is naturalistic.

Firmly focused as it is on the misinterpretation of a child's actions and intentions, this is guaranteed to trigger memories of childhood injustices in the viewer. Like the best coming-of-age films, this presents childhood as a bittersweet experience, a sun-baked sadness, a world apart and often misread by adults. Only for the last act does it truly go fully into melodrama, ending on an impressively contrived composition of reunion; but until then, it has woven a bright and breezy meander through the denial and difficulties of grief against the misinterpretations of childhood.