Feeling life slowly slipping by and with his wife perpetually busy, Gianni (Di Gregorio) decides the time has come to find a lover. Things, though, are not quite so simple for the sixty-something Roman.Gianni Di Gregorio reunites with Mid-August Lunch mamma Valeria de Franciscis Bendoni for this wistful treatise on how men and women see each other. Daunted by the prospect of spending his retirement running errands for busy wife Elisabetta Piccolomini, Di Gregorio ponders gadabout lawyer Alfonso Santagata's suggestion he takes a lover. But while he still has a roving eye and a flirty manner, the saggy sexagenarian isn't convinced he has what it takes to entice the females of his acquaintance. Generously allowing everyone to steal scenes while being the butt of much self-deprecating humour, Di Gregorio conveys the pangs of ageing with a gentle if regretful wit whose charm is reinforced by the impeccable script and deft playing. Moreover, his fantasising always feels more gallant than grotesque.Watch The Salt of Life Movie Online
Gianni Di Gregorio worked in theater and film for years (co-writing, among other things, Matteo Garrone's bleak Naples crime survey Gomorrah), but came to directing late, unveiling his debut behind the camera in 2008, when he was just shy of age 60. Mid-August Lunch was a stealthy success, a seemingly featherweight farce with an acid aftertaste that focused on a middle-aged bachelor who lives at home and is forced by his financial straits to take in the elderly matriarchs of families heading off for summer holidays.
For his second effort, The Salt Of Life, Di Gregorio hasn't felt the need to stray far from his winning formula. He once again stars as a man named Gianni who's under the thumb of a needy, possessive mother (Valeria De Franciscis, who played a similar character in Mid-August Lunch). This go-round, he has a wife and daughter who take him equally for granted--he wakes the former up every morning with coffee, and allows the latter to steal his breakfast before he heads downstairs to walk a dog owned by his pretty party-girl neighbor. He's retired--or rather, was forced into early retirement--and has allowed himself to become an on-call handyman/errand-runner/financial doormat for all the women in his life. He's worried about money and his own mortality, though he tries not to let it show; Di Gregorio has a handsome but hound-doggish face that makes him look like he hasn't slept well in years.
Di Gregorio's principal concern isn't that so much that those around him don't appreciate him, it's that he's aging and is afraid of being perceived as doddering and harmless. "I don't want to go out and be just another old man on the street," he tells a friend. Then he embarks on a few awkward attempts at flirtation that are prompted as much by his need for women to take him seriously again as by actual lust. His mother's maid, the daughter of an old family friend, a bartender at a club--none of them seem to even think of him as a sexual being, and the mental emasculation is worse than being turned down. The breeziness of The Salt Of Life disguises a barbed consideration of mortality and being written off, becoming part of the scenery in later life--just another elderly man with a dog, watching the world go by.
Three years ago, after a lifetime of acting in the theatre and working as an assistant director and screenwriter in the cinema, the 60-year-old Gianni Di Gregorio won major national and international fame as co-author of Matteo Garrone's expansive Italian crime movie Gomorrah, a complex exposé of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia. He immediately followed this up with an even greater personal success as the writer, director and star of the low-budget, multi-prizewinning Mid?August Lunch. In that gem-like chamber comedy he played a retired middle-aged bachelor caring for his ancient mother in the bustling central Roman district of Trastevere and being persuaded to take care of three other old women over a bank holiday weekend.
His new film, The Salt of Life, is quite as good. It's also set in Di Gregorio's native Trastevere, and once more he plays a dutiful middle-aged son called Gianni with the outrageous nonagenarian Valeria De Franciscis Bendoni as his poker-playing, Krug-swilling mother. This time Gianni is married with a daughter, living on a modest pension but still at the beck and call of the imperious Valeria, who lives in a grand town house and is steadily diminishing her son's inheritance on a daily basis through her extravagant ways. However, because of her dotty vitality, the law regards this 96-year-old as compos mentis and won't give her son the power of attorney to restrain her.
Gianni's a kindly, decent, thoughtful man, who has his first cigarette of the day before getting out of his pyjamas and drinks too much white wine without being a guilt-ridden alcoholic. He has become a seemingly marginal but extremely valuable figure in many people's lives, all as vividly sketched as Gianni himself. "Transparent" is the word he finds to describe his own presence. His wife casually dictates a shopping list before going to work. His pretty daughter, ring in nose, equally casually devours the breakfast he's prepared for himself before going off to college. Her indolent, unemployed, pot?smoking hippy boyfriend cadges food and grabs the morning paper when he eventually gets out of bed, which is after Gianni has taken his little Scottish terrier and a neighbour's St Bernard for a walk while doing the morning's shopping.Watch The Salt of Life Movie Online
The film is packed with subtly observed details of behaviour and gesture of a kind we associate with Ealing comedy at its zenith, and an elaborate Chekhovian story is being told before we realise it. The movie's original title is the straightforward "Gianni and the Women" (Gianni e le Donne), and at the centre of the narrative there emerges a story of discontent, unrest and sexual pursuit initiated by Gianni's best friend, the plump, Mercedes-driving lawyer Alfonso, a matter hinted at in the margins of Mid-August Lunch. Alfonso believes every middle-aged man should have a younger mistress, though whether he himself has the success he claims in this area is dubious. Not only does he implant this idea in Gianni's mind but he nurtures it. In its extreme form this involves him giving Gianni the visiting card of a Roman bordello, forcing a Viagra tablet into his mouth on the balcony of his flat as he tends his flowers, washing it down with water from the spout of a watering can, and dispatching him by car with a map that he can't read without his glasses. This is the point when the constant chuckles elicited by an unerringly truthful film give way to unrestrained laughter. But we always laugh with Gianni, not at him. He never becomes pathetic, is never degraded. He's a romantic, and there isn't a trace of lechery or malice in him.
