Family Affairs

Georges Delerue's theme music for François Truffaut's Jules and Jim is the most emotionally affecting movie score ever written. The main melody is paced by gentle, almost pizzicato, string accents. It harmonizes the affections of the film's principal characters (a love triangle) while their aching entanglement is made almost palpable. Delerue achieved the miraculous effect of both matching the story's exuberance and penetrating it. He captured the depth of love trouble.

To hear Delerue's unforgettable theme while watching Marco Tullio Giordana's The Best of Youth is initially disorienting. Those trenchant notes belong to Jules and Jim, as much a signature of its greatness as the famous freeze frame of Jeanne Moreau's mysterious, open-mouthed laugh. But Giordana justifies this borrowing because The Best of Youth is much more than simply a young filmmaker's homage. Its story of nearly 40 years in the life of an Italian family-concentrating on the crisscrossing destinies of brothers Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo (Alessio Boni)-proves that Giordana understands the profundity of Delerue and Truffaut's three-way love story. The Best of Youth takes on an estheticized standard of romanticism as a means of expressing national and personal identity.

The Carati brothers experience Italy's turmoil from the mid 60s to the present. Psychiatrist Nicola and policeman Matteo embody the spiritual fragmentation of that era; they stay bonded, despite distances of years and travel, because of their family devotion. They share affinity for beauty and for the effort to do good just like the pals who came from different cultures to form the new 20th-century bohemia of Jules and Jim. In matching Nicola and Matteo's joys and sorrows to the definitive movie soundtrack, Giordana seeks a moral compass for his six-hour family drama. He reassesses the modern history of the West-from the impact of rock 'n' roll and student revolution to the issues of political terrorism and family heritage. If you dare borrow from Jules and Jim, your ambition had better be at least this grand.

Film Forum's presentation of The Best of Youth rescues Giordana's heroic gesture. Miramax had been unable to schedule the film's American release in our narrow, increasingly strained, gimmick-based market. Although commissioned for Italian television, The Best of Youth was made as cinema. Giordana does nothing less than update the definition of the melodrama genre (drama + music, domestic crisis + emotion). His effort has global significance. It shames U.S. film and tv as a culture that is in the pits-epitomized by media acclaim for such frivolity as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos.

Giordana revitalizes the family melodrama by pursuing the virtue of sympathy-which Nicola's college professor defines "in the Greek sense" as "sharing the pathos of someone's suffering." TVs are a recurring motif as the Carati family moves forward through history, sometimes witnessing it via the box, but human connection and social awareness are in their blood. Giordana means to transcend television's superficiality with characters connected to the movie legacy of family drama.

I can't think of another movie experience this decade as fulfilling as watching the Carati family's tale evoke cinema's peak emotional achievements-primarily other epic films about family. This doesn't mean that The Best of Youth is a madcap potpourri of stylistic tropes like Tarantino's Kill Bill. Rather, seizing the tv-maker's freedom to concentrate on domestic intimacy gives Giordana an advantage over other filmmaking contemporaries. His expansive narrative goes beyond soap opera, alternating small and big moments in the characters' lives with artful subtlety. (Nicola's young daughter wonders about her estranged mother's hair color, then Giordana shifts-years in a blink-to the mother made-over in relation to life-altering events.) It's like reading Middlemarch except that Giordana offers the sensuousness of film in which undying family resemblances stir an uncanny sense of recognition. In this film, visible physical change immediately conveys the passage of time.

As Nicola and Matteo go from optimistic students to adults, Giordana follows their search for love and purpose-first with Giorgia (Jasmine Trinca), a sanitarium patient who rouses both brothers' compassion; then Nicola's romance with Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco), a radical who becomes a member of the Red Brigade; and finally Matteo's affair with Mirella (Maya Sansa), a photographer whose sincerity contrasts with his restlessness. These relationships unfold while recording modern Italy's social history. Matteo and Mirella's union goes deeper than either could guess, and this unpredictable quality gives The Best of Youth existential richness and extra-cinematic breadth.

When Nicola watches a tv broadcast of citizens protesting against mafia violence, vowing "We pledge to love each other as brothers," the national commitment awakens his personal one. This moment recalls Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, especially the dramatization of how urban change affects family unity. Giordana investigates Visconti's extraordinary sense of family loss to get at feelings deeper than nostalgia. The sense of common tragedy and blessing are conveyed with operatic magnitude (it's in the way Nicola and Matteo cry, smile or risk their own comfort). Giordana enhances family life rituals just like Coppola's The Godfather and Bertolucci's 1900, which are both directly referenced. The scene where Nicola's school friend quotes Brando's chin-scratching and raspy "Ask me with the proper respect" is a startling reminder that world cinema can define the family circle.

With this one monumental film, Giordana summarizes the boomer experience more explicitly than Coppola. Some argue Star Wars as post-Vietnam Oedipal conflict, but its sci-fi fantasy lacks Giordana's realistic political basis. Starting with Adriana Asti's casting as Nicola and Matteo's mother, Giordana centers the film around political observations that are both rigorous and tender (such as Asti saying, "Romans seem so cynical but are full of irony"-true urban wisdom). In a remarkable classroom scene where the mother is distracted from her vocations as teacher and parent, Asti brings the legacy of her roles in Bertolucci's Before the Revolution and Pasolini's Accattone, still pioneering the perception of psychology and politics in personal life. It is equally amazing to watch a Carati sibling lament ecological lapses (while evoking Antonioni's The Red Desert); to see the corruption at a Sicilian slaughterhouse (which evokes Rosi's Le Mani Sulla Città); and observe Nicola resolving a fight with Giula by spontaneously imitating the Chaplin Modern Times poster on their apartment wall. The Best of Youth represents Giordana's harvest of Italian cinema's vivid social scrutiny.

To draw on an immortal melody from French cinema makes more sense than the euro-it's an exchange of cultural currency. Giordana felt inspired to reach toward cinema's highest standards. The panoply of characters and alluring performances bring back the pleasure of long-form filmmaking that was distorted by The Lord of the Rings but that people fondly remember from Gone with the Wind, The Godfather trilogy and, of course, Jules and Jim. Moviemaking that compresses time and reflection is increasingly rare; for Giordana it's not corny, but confirmation that youth and life are "sad and beautiful." Those are Nicola's words but they also describe all great cinema. In his youth Nicola once wrote, "'Everything in life is beautiful' with three exclamation points." But as an aged man who has suffered, he slightly recants, "I no longer believe in exclamation points"-and then Giordana's epic reaches its astonishingly simple climax. Epiphany earned.