The Italian director Daniele Luchetti's new movie, My Brother Is an Only Child, has a script that the director worked on with Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli; Petraglia and Rulli co-wrote The Best of Youth, a sensational six-hour family saga, spanning four decades, that played American theaters in 2005. At first glance, My Brother could pass for The Best of Youth: The Portable Edition. Like the earlier epic, it deals with the political battles of the sixties, and their implosion in the terrorist-ridden Italy of the seventies, as reflected in the relationship of two brothers. The central figure is Accio, the brother who, as a boy teetering on the brink of puberty, wants to be a priest. For a few scenes I was afraid that the movie was going to be one of those European mood pieces that traps you in a monastery with some dumb cluck who takes the whole movie to figure out that he needs to get the hell out of there, but once Accio becomes both confused and emboldened by his hormonal urges, he rethinks his career plan gratifyling quick and moves back in with his family. Disillusioned from age thirteen on, Accio (who's played by Elio Germano from around the time that his skin breaks out), has little choice but to declare himself a fascist, especially since his older brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio) is both an announced Communist and a natural born heartthrob who effortlessly secures the undying romantic devotion of Francesca, played by Diane Fleri, a twenty-three-year-old French actress who could probably persuade Richard Dawkins to run for president on the Flat Earth Party ticket.
Despite its pedigree, My Brother Is an Only Child isn't in the same league as The Best of Youth, a brazenly unfair comparison if ever I've made one. But on its own more modest terms it's smart and affecting, with the conflicts of years ago treated with all the wisdom of hindsight but a minimum of sentimentality. (Luca Zingaretti, who plays the beefy older knucklehead who indoctrinates the hero in Mussolini worship, comes across as a likable sort of harmless eccentric--until he grows a contingent of thugs to order around.) The filmmakers' sympathies may be with the political left, but their funniest scene is a piece of campus lunacy where Manrico and his comrades perform a politically corrected version of Ode to Joy. (The performance is disrupted by Fascists who burst in yelling, “Leave Beethoven alone or we’ll bust your ass!”) Part of the charm of the movie, as with other Italian films such as The Best of Youth and Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night, is that it carries the reassuring message that America isn't the only country that can't seem to get past arguing who was driven crazier by the sixties.