DIFF ’02: Other People’s Life

La vita degli altri
*/****
starring Teresa Saponangelo, Renato Carpentieri, Maya Sansa, Rosa Pianeta
written and directed by Nicola de Rinaldo

by Walter Chaw Ponderously employing a modern eruption of Vesuvius as a metaphor for what is essentially a Telemundo soaper about an aging gangster reaping a lifetime of bitter fruit, Italian director Nicola de Rinaldo's clumsily titled Other People's Life is melodramatic, unintentionally hilarious, and derivative to boot. Mariano (Renato Carpentieri) is a Camorra lifer who, stricken by the guilt of wrongly murdering his brother decades before, decides to become a completely passive presence in his own life, allowing through his inaction his daughter and sister to become endangered by a younger generation of hungrier mobster. Because Mariano lives on the side of Mt. Vesuvius, vulcanologist Luisa (Maria Teresa Saponangelo, bearing a passing resemblance to the breathtaking Natalia Verbeke) visits to set up her instruments in his yard and sitting room. Provoking something of a surrogate daughter situation, Luisa's presence inspires Mariano to warn his own horrible and not-worth-saving daughter and attempt to save his housekeeper and her family. Other People's Life is an insipid and saccharine Godfather II that oozes with self-pity and appears to be missing entire transitional sequences. With long takes and lingering glances substituting for sense and character development, the picture is an endurance test of the worst kind: maudlin and muddy, mistaking a tired extended metaphor for the meaning of life. The only lessons offered by Other People's Life, sadly, involve being very careful with how one uses a score and more cautious still in hiring an editor.