Il capitale umano (Human Capital) **** (2013, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Matilde Gioli, Valeria Golino) – Movie Review

In northern Italy, a car knocks a cyclist off the road during the night before Christmas Eve. Then the destinies of two contrasting families, one very rich and the other comfortably middle class, are irrevocably bound together through the relationship between their children, and the mystery surrounding the accident. Just who was driving the car?

Family tensions, frustrated lives, thwarted aspirations, the northern Italian way life, both business and cultural, are all profitably explored in this sleek, engrossing and richly satisfying circular multi-drama. It’s based on Stephen Amidon’s novel set in moneyed Connecticut, but it is very smoothly relocated to Italy’s wealthy north.

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi makes a poignant and powerful impression as Carla, the lovely, bored and misused matriarch of the rich family, a failed actress, whose dodgy businessman husband Giovanni (Fabrizio Gifuni, splendidly slimy) allows her to buy a decaying theatre to restore it and start it up again as a place of culture.

Instead, the husband pulls the plugs on the finance and decides to sell the theatre on to developers without even telling her, and the wife bonks with her married artistic director, ignoring her friend’s phone plea to rescue her drunk son Massimiliano (Guglielmo Pinelli), who somehow gets back to the house that night, along with his car. Is he the cause of the accident?

The simultaneous allure and emptiness of high-class Italian living are painted in careful brush strokes, and Tedeschi is remarkable, vulnerable and pathetic, a study in pointless failure because her character didn’t have the guts to follow her dream and now she’s stuck in a nightmare. Tedeschi makes you believe and care.

The young people in film are all confused and troubled, no wonder when they have such useless parents and parenting. Italian society is ripped apart. Fabrizio Bentivoglio does well as the bumbling father of the middle class family, a humble estate agent who knows he could better in life, but doesn’t know how, and is greedy enough to get involved with Tedeschi ‘s husband in a dodgy get-rich-quick scheme that predictably goes wrong real quick. He’s a grabby simpleton, soon way out of his depth, but with enough native cunning to help him survive such a bad situation, even if he has to resort to desperate, and foul means.

It’s also good to see Valeria Golino again, older now, as the psychologist, and mother to the drunk son’s girlfriend, who also might have driven the car that night and caused the accident.

The circular timeline is clever and hugely satisfying, as handled here by co-writer/director Paolo Virzì, with this way of telling a story in a non-linear way, keeping the solution to the mystery out of sight till the end and a high level of fascination with the movie too. But actually it isn’t about plot at all. We’ve seen this kind of story before, and even this way of telling it, so there could be a bit of deja vu, though even so Virzi makes it seem startlingly fresh and original.

It’s all about character and social detail. Italy and the Italians are found totally lacking, but really this story could be set anywhere in the West. It’s both particular and universal. And, of course, it was originally set in moneyed Connecticut and was a critique of one kind of the American way of life and the way the rich can ride roughshod over the little people when their security or wealth are is threatened.

I really liked the characters in the movie and their dilemmas and moral issues, even the characters I didn’t like are fascinating. Flawed as Italy and the Italians are painted here, they’re still attractive and alluring. I greatly enjoyed spending time with them, however flawed or appalling.

Tedeschi was awarded Best Actress at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival and the film was selected as the Italian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards.

The title is a term for a pay-out by insurance companies that estimate the life expectancy of a someone who dies in an accident multiplied by the income of the victim.

Original title: Il capitale umano.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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