A new Italian film finds the wisdom beyond existential angst.
The conjoined terms "existential" and "angst" make frequent public***image1*** appearances together. The union is no accident. For human existence-with its excruciating awareness of finitude-and angst-that combination of pacing impuissance and burning, longing heart-were meant for one another. Still, existential angst is a state worth tearing apart and examining now and again. Hey, it's done it to us, hasn't it? What's fair is fair.
So where is this particular breed of despair to be found? Dig through old novels and a prototype begins to emerge. Existential angst primarily infects men-men of societal options-in their late teens and early 20s. No doubt these gender and class biases are largely due to male- and middle-class-centric tendencies in fiction, but it is also due in part to the historic necessity for men with middling means to
find themselves in the world
.
Age is key. A pre-adolescent can not yet experience existential angst. Nor can it be felt by the middle-aged. In later years it becomes something either more pathetic or more profound. And existential angst is certainly not sexually contracted, for it rarely seems to be experienced by anyone who is even approaching coital union.
The protagonist of the new Italian film
My Brother Is an Only Child
, Accio Benassi (Elio Germano), meets these criteria in full and serves as the vehicle for one of the finer explorations of existential angst-and thus coming of age-in recent cinema. But, although primarily a bildungsroman,
My Brother
***image2***is also an astute dissection of the way larger social forces and family dynamics interact to form an individual's trajectory.
The film opens in 1962, in a mid-sized Italian town near Rome. Accio is, at this point, a rebellious youth of about 12, on his way to being ejected from seminary school. His older brother, Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio), whose brooding good looks are equal parts Jude Law and Benicio Del Toro, is quickly becoming a charismatic Communist leader. The boys' parents, along with the town's beautiful women, clearly favor Manrico.
Accio's sense of rejection and his relegation to what he perceives as being an unfairly marginalized member of the family, leave him sympathetic to the reactionary fascists who want to restore Italy's prestige. As the brothers are pushed to opposite poles of Italy's tumultuous political scene, their sister is made peripheral because of her gender and their religious, hard-working parents are, through a generational rupture, relegated to societal obsolescence; the family becomes a microcosmic mirror of 1960s Italian society.
Because of very fine acting, particularly by Germano and director Daniele Luchetti's keen eye for, and concentration on, character, this macro/micro parallel never becomes base nor overstated. Instead, Luchetti slyly navigates-both for Accio and for the generation of which he is a part-those years when the driving question shifts from "Who should I be?" to "What have I become?" (
My Brother
will, therefore, appeal greatly to those who liked the film
The Namesake
or Gustave Flaubert's novel,
A Sentimental Education
.) What's so impressive about the way Luchetti handles the film is the way he retains a sense of both the determined nature of human fate, as well as the overwhelming importance of the decisions we make.
What
My Brother
so astutely unveils is that it is the contradictory realizations of one's determined nature, alone with one's great responsibility, that animates the years of existential angst. To move through these years successfully is to grow wiser. The film leaves Accio-and the audience-on the cusp of just this sort of wisdom.
