Sweet Dreams

During his five-decade career, director Marco Bellocchio has proved an acute chronicler of the Italian psyche and social scene. But he misjudges the tone of this adaptation of journalist Massimo Gramellini's autobiographical novel. It begins charmingly in 1964, as a mother teaches nine-year-old son Massimo about horror movies and the Twist. But her unexplained death traumatises the boy to the extent that he remains emotionally scarred three decades later while working as an agony aunt for Turin daily paper La Stampa. Terminally lugubrious, the adult Massimo (Valerio Mastrandrea) is a difficult character to empathise with and Bellocchio scarcely helps his cause with a gauche interlude in war-torn Sarajevo that is made all the more gratingly sentimental by Carlo Crivelli's gushing score. Bérénice Bejo and Emmanuelle Devos contribute contrasting cameos as Mastrandrea edges towards his Terpsichorean epiphany, and the film's imagery is delightful. But, while Bellocchio organises the non-linear material with customary aplomb, his psychological insights are as unconvincing as the old-age make-up worn by Guido Caprino as Mastrandrea's detached father.