Short Takes
MY BROTHER IS AN ONLY CHILD A smash in its native Italy, drawn in swift strokes and shot with light, quick handheld camerawork, Daniele Luchetti’s engagingly square saga of toy revolutionaries has the same romantic sweep (in a third the running time) as screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli’s six-hour miniseries The Best of Youth—along with the same superficial if-it’s-Tuesday-this-must-be-the-Cuban-missile-crisis passage-of-years pageantry. But it’s a far juicier piece of storytelling, powered by charismatic leads who make convincing siblings. All politics is local, the old ward heeler adage goes, and the precinct doesn’t get much smaller than that of Luchetti’s combustible comedy-drama: the crumbling household in 1960s Latina where Accio (the appealingly gangly Elio Germano), a budding teenage Fascist, trades smacks and curses with his older brother, a rising Communist firebrand. Their feud carries over from adolescence into adulthood, as Accio’s fervid embrace of “the Idea” places him in direct conflict with militant Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio, a heartthrob with Alain Delon’s ruthless-youth beauty), testing their family ties with violence. Accio’s sudden turn from the seminary to Il Duce salutes is as unexplained (and perhaps self-explanatory) as Manrico’s casual sexism in service of the struggle. But politics is less the movie’s subject than the heady fumes its characters breathe. Capturing some of the knockabout tone of Lina Wertmuller’s antic 1970s farces, Luchetti cares more about moral and emotional bonds in hard-on collision with hormones and dogma—as when the pimply far-right ideologue falls for his bro’s luminous Marxist girlfriend (Diane Fieri), or finds his neo-Brown Shirt chums planning to firebomb his brother’s car. (The highpoint is a “de-fascistized” student-guerrilla performance of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—an exciting set piece that seesaws from satire to suspense, from intimate quiet to large-scale action, and from public chest-beating to private defiance.) The sobering ending comes as no shock—but even so, when it’s over, call your brother, OK? In Italian with subtitles. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at the Belcourt; the 7 p.m. show Friday will be introduced by Italian-cinema scholar Joy Ramirez, and the 7 p.m. show Saturday is the Italian Film Night gathering of Nashville’s Amerigo Vespucci Society, open to the public.)
SURFWISE For its first half, Doug Pray’s mesmerizingly ambivalent documentary about an itinerant family of Jewish surfer health nuts operates in breezy colorful-geezer mode: Surfwise offers 84-year-old physician turned surfer dude Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz and his nine kids as intrepid explorers of an alternative American dream based on healthy living and withdrawal from society. But whether you call the family’s life (cruising America in a beat-up two-room RV) a Rousseau-ian paradise or Capturing the Friedmans by the Sea will depend on where you stand on hippie living—until the film takes a sickening sideways lurch, as the Paskowitz offspring, still smiling away, admit that their father beat them when they didn’t shape up; that he used his eldest son, David, as an enforcer; and that they had to listen while Doc had nightly sex with his terrifyingly compliant wife. Paskowitz isn’t scary just because he’s an abusive father, but because he’s an absolutist—and, like most absolutists, he’s a brutal perfectionist blind to the differences between himself and anybody else. How he got that way is never clarified, despite weak testimony from his siblings. And, as you’d expect from a documentary co-produced by the son of its subject, Surfwise ends with hugs all around. But at a family reunion, the genial old gent still can’t resist pitting a slim son against his chubbier brother. —Ella Taylor (Opens Friday at the Belcourt, kicking off the Summer Doc Block of documentaries through July 2)
