by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $17.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Intro:
… a funny and mindful romance worth falling for.
First dates tend to be noisy. Not necessarily because of the couple two tables away at the same restaurant who speak in all caps, or the chest-thumping bass coming off those massive concert speakers, or the enveloping colony of seagulls chomping for spare chips on the beachfront. Although, those could certainly contribute. But rather, it’s the noise on the inside, especially among the more neurotic seekers of companionship. That inner monologue, picking apart everything said and unsaid, actions taken and not taken, keeping oneself as contained within the magnifying glass as their date. You end so fixated on what you’re ‘supposed to’ be doing that you end up losing the importance of the moment.
Somebody to Love, the latest film from Italian cine-sociologist Paolo Genovese (Perfect Strangers), is a rom-com with a seemingly straight-forward premise: Piero (Edoardo Leo) and Lara (Pilar Fogliati) are on their first date. But where the framing gets interesting is that the screen-time is split between them going on that date, and their respective groups of inner voices guiding them along.
It’s tempting to liken this to Inside Out with its literal-psychological visualisation, as the studious voices like the Professor (Marco Gallini) and Alfa (Clauda Pandolfi) try to wrangle in the others, like the comparably innocent and sweet Romeo (Maurizio Lastrico) and Giulietta (Vittoria Puccini), but as those voices are more representative of personality traits than singular feelings and reactions, it’s honestly closer to Fifty Shades of Grey. Specifically, the book, where Anastasia’s ‘inner goddess’ would do silly symbolic things in her mind to try and distract the reader from how drawn-out and amazingly vanilla the rest of the content is, one presumes.
Here, though, those inner personalities add a lot to the film’s overwhelmingly sweet and natural atmosphere. At times, it’s like watching a group of friends brainstorming options for getting through certain romantic milestones. While at others, it’s quite articulate of actual thinking processes, like when Piero’s team are trying to find the right word to describe something. These scenes hit the right insightful tone and bolster the main romance without feeling like a jarring distraction from it (although the finale does drag on, in contrast to how breezy the pacing is otherwise)
And amidst the duelling internal ideologies, the multiplied self-examinations of what one truly wants to happen this evening, and some remarkably well-handled symbolic actions for oral sex, the core romance between Piero and Lara is just gorgeous. Both recently separated, both incredibly nervous and self-doubting, and both just trying to find some level of happiness in each other. Their internal polylogues, while being highly entertaining all on their own, also help to show just how easy it is to get stuck in your own head when you genuinely want to show your most attractive self. Paired with the effortless and swoon-worthy chemistry between the two prospective lovers, allows us to want to see them succeed.
Somebody To Love is a funny and mindful romance worth falling for. The cast is immaculate, both for the real world and the mind parlours, the soundtrack weaves beautifully between classical standards and more cosmopolitan pop (expect to be humming Queen all the way home), and the story shows a vibrant twist on a rom-com staple. It represents psychological cinema at its softest, where the camera lens as a window into the mind reveals a shared nervous energy, idealising romance as finding someone whose inner noise matches your own.
