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Brothers have been headlining epic Italian dramas since the wolf-weaned Romulus and Remus founded Rome. Originally made for Italian TV, Marco Tullio Giordana’s engrossing film tracks two brothers over 37 years of history and six hours of screen time, but its intimacy and its unpretentious immediacy belie the epic label. We first see Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo (Alessio Boni) as university students, and their respective subjects, medicine and poetry, grow from their different sensibilities: cheerful compassion marks Nicola, whereas the saturnine Matteo experiences anti-social urges he himself doesn’t understand. Matteo joins the army in order to have rules; Nicola treats the mentally ill. As they and family and friends age, so does Italy, through the 1966 flooding of Florence, the terrorist incursions of the Brigate Rosse, Mafia purges, and beyond. The biggest loss is Nicola’s girlfriend Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco), mother of their child but a BR sympathizer. But Nicola’s humane optimism emerges as the film’s compass, and Giordana, his patient pace grounding this work of love in lived experience, achieves both family drama and the story of his troubled nation as family writ large. In Italian with English subtitles. (363 minutes)
BY NICOLAS RAPOLD
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