By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Gianni Amelio
Starring: Enrico Lo Verso | Francesco Giuffrida | Rosaria Danzè
Original language title: Così ridevano
Country: italy
Year: 2002
Running time: 124
IMDB: http://us.imdb.com/Details?0139951
Diane says: “I went to see this one because I loved Gianni Amelio’s 1994 LAMERICA–to jog your memory, two Italians go to Albania to take advantage of government money for new businesses and it ends miserably, miserably.
“THE WAY WE LAUGHED stars the main actor from LAMERICA, Enrico Lo Verso, who is wonderful to watch. An illiterate Sicilian, he arrives by train in Turin to work to support his younger brother, already there as a student. The scenes of Turin in the ’50s are shot in a steely blue; the grime of the station, of the city, and of the masses looking for work comes right off the screen.
“The film is presented in chapters of one day per year from the late ’50s to the early ’60s; when one brother is up, the other is down. A NYT reviewer said that the structure of the film is epic (reminded me of AN UNBERABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING), but the story is experimental. A lot of information is missing–too much, I felt–so that the viewer is not able to fully appreciate the brothers’ relationship, especially since they are very different but so tied together. Maybe some of that for me is because I don’t know what was going on in Italy during those years. (Watching LAMERICA, on the other hand, I got a very good idea of the situation in Albania in the early ’90s.) And since much of the story relates to prejudice against the Sicilians (they talked funny, they were unschooled, they didn’t have connections), I felt the loss of not being able to hear the Sicilian accent, awkwardly accounted for in the subtitles.
” The last chapter, like the opening one, has a brother arriving on a train. But now the setting is a beautiful country villa, and everything is reversed, except perhaps for the older brother’s ability to fool himself.” 3 cats