Characters and dialogue are the key to Paolo Virzì’s fresh comedy-drama, (La prima cosa bella, Ovosodo) mixing much laughter with unnerving tension. Like Crazy, a study of two very different women in a psychiatric institution, avoids any relation to past films such as Cuckoo’s Nest or even Thelma and Louise. Virzi is an acknowledged master at combining a bigger-than-life script with certain Italian traits, all within a grounding sense of realism. He’s done it again here. Beatrice (Bruni Tedeschi), an effusive, non-stop chatterbox fantasist, befriends Donatella (Micaela Ramazzotti), a fragile, tattooed introvert at the psychiatric clinic, Villa Biondi. They are selected for day leave, to work at a local nursery. They do not return. Instead, it’s shopping, restaurants, nightclubs and old flames on the agenda.
=0D=0A=This story is filled with delicious dialogue and boasts a rare sense of balance relying on an unpredictable and moving friendship that develops between the two women as they flee the mental institution. It is full of understanding for it’s damaged players and that makes it utterly enticing. “What are we doing?” Donatella asks. “We’re having fun,” Beatrice declares.
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