The fear of the single and fancy-free that marriage is hell propelled the likable 2001 hit Italian romantic comedy The Last Kiss, about a group of thirty-something friends and their various struggles with settling down and commitment.
In this grotesquely ill-judged and sadly interminable sequel, writer-director Gabriele Muccino returns to home turf after a sojourn in Hollywood making The Pursuit of Happyness and catches up with the same characters 10 years down the track.
'Happyness" is not what he finds. These people, he decides, were not wary enough of the joys of domesticity when they were younger. Not only has commitment turned out to be fleeting, but modern life has flung all relationships into the doomsday machine. In a series of interwoven plot strands we pick through the sad evidence: The perpetual jealousy of ex’s; vulnerable single kids to stir your guilt; casual boyfriends who insist despite your displeasure on being the kid’s new Dad; cheating former partners you profess to despise yet can’t quite wash out of your emotional hair; and good friends who just happen to take up with your woman when you pop off to jail for a couple of years for cocaine smuggling and return in a bad wig. Heck, your 25-year-old girlfriend won’t even do the decent thing and pretend not to care when you have passionate sex with the wife during your weekly access visit to the kiddy.
Where these characters’ faults were previously considered foibles that we could see as universal human weaknesses, the forty-something versions are more blatantly self-indulgent, and so shamelessly self-pitying they often appear pathetic. The characters may be genuinely suffering but you just want to slap them and tell them to pull themselves together. The only one with an excuse is Paolo, who suffers the extreme mood swings of the bipolar sufferer, but that’s still not enough to stop you crossing your fingers that he’ll put five bullets in the chamber when he plays Russian roulette, as you know he inevitably will.
The sad thing is all this hyperbolic absurdity should have provided plenty of rich material for comic exploitation but Muccino, for reasons best understood by himself, decides to play the entire thing in the key of melodramatic excess, and then some. A film where the characters are all ridiculous yet the filmmaker lacks the necessary understanding of their absurdity, is either going to be intentionally funny or a sado-masochistic exercise in which the filmmaker falls very publicly upon his sword. The latter is what we get here. Perhaps it’s a telling reflection of life under Berlusconi.
If there is anything positive to be said about the film, it is that it might eventually come to be regarded as an unintentional camp classic. If there has ever been a hit comedy whose sequel was so completely lacking in even a passing attempt at humour, it must have passed me by. These characters are ludicrously overblown, so shameless in their self-pity, that it’s hard sometimes to suppress the urge to guffaw. This is certainly ironic.
Melodrama is not inherently bad. (As I’ve been recently arguing with friends in reference to Black Swan, to criticise a film for being melodramatic is like bagging a comedy for being humorous. It is what it is). Melodrama is a rhetorical language that a sensitively daring filmmaker can learn to speak with eloquence. The characters’ emotions are larger than life, but if it handled correctly the audience can relate to them as effectively dramatised projections of their own emotional lives. (All emotions are heightened when we’re caught up in them.)
But Kiss Me Again is not a well-crafted melodrama; it’s closer to a glossy soap with pretensions to profundity. I’ve never seen an Italian soap opera, but if one turned up in my bad dreams, it would probably resemble Kiss Me Again – lots of passionate, hot-blooded 'Latin types’ losing their rag at the drop of a hat-pin. (What a bizarrely romantic title for such a bitterly unromantic film, incidentally.) I’m not stereotyping a nationality here: the film plays as an entirely unintentional parody of Italian clichés that almost certainly don’t exist in the real world. The histrionics erupt with such monotonous regularity that the audience could reliably set their watches to them.
The film’s only saving grace – and the reason it earns so much as a single star – is the presence of the Italian-born French actor Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi as an optimistic and gently philosophical widow in a few of the final scenes. Suddenly we see a film that might have been, one with shadings of emotion and lightness; some pianissimo to counter the fortisssimo. Alas, those moments are brief.
