POINTS: 7
In Maria Sole Tognazzi’s Viaggio Sola (“A Five Star Life”), Irene (Margherita Buy) is a good looking forty-something woman with a dream job: she’s a luxury hotel inspector and so she spends 90 percent of her time at five star hotels in Paris, Berlin, Marrakech … However, as glamorous as that may sound, she nonetheless feels dissatisfied — but she’s not aware of that. For she’s the typical type of character bound to have a typical awakening at the very ending of the film. You saw that coming, right?
She once had a boyfriend, Andrea (Stefano Accorsi) she’s now friends with, but she hasn’t been romantically involved with anyone for a long time. She has no children, which shouldn’t be a problem because she says she’s never felt the need to be a mother. Every now and then she takes care of her two little nieces, but that’s as far as it goes. So she’s very devoted to her work but she lacks a real life.
Viaggio Sola is a very, very light drama — with a very, very formulaic spark of comedy and romance — that emphasizes its premise so much that it gets boring before you know it. It’s also an exercise in redundancy of what you see in the first act — namely Irene visiting hotels and doing her job in not the happiest of moods — is almost exactly the same thing you see in the second act. By the time you reach the third act, another character surfaces: Kate, a middle-aged feminist writer who, without knowing the part, will help Irene realize she’s leading the wrong kind of life. Of course, she needed somebody else to tell her that because the script was too busy with so much glossy travelogue and superb five-star hotels.
By the way, Kate teaches Irene that she needs to make an urgent change in her life through one of the most unimaginative, cheapest tricks in a beginner’s scriptwriting course. This is in perfect tune with the ending where, of course, Irene realizes she likes children after all, and she does so in an unbelievably trite and implausible manner.
There’s also something quite odd about the structure of the narrative: what should matter the most — that is to say, the core of the conflicts — is almost entirely left out of the movie, and so what you see is the before and after. And this is not deliberate. No wonder it feels you’re watching connected fragments that never make up a whole.
It’s only fair to point that out that Buy does deliver a decent performance as the obsessive, angst-ridden Irene and Accorsi is equally convincing as her former boyfriend. But that’s not much to say considering what a mess almost everything else is.
Production notes
Viaggio sola / A Five Star Life (Italy, 2013) Directed by Maria Sole Tognazzi. Written by Ivan Cotroneo, Francesca Marciano, Maria Sole Tognazzi. With Margherita Buy, Stefano Accorsi, Fabrizia Sacchi, Lesley Manville. Cinematography: Arnaldo Catinari. Editing: Walter Fasano. Running time: 85 minutes.
@pablsuarez
