Aldo between Giovanni and Giacomo, spoiljoy at the wedding (score 7-)- Corriere.it

When you go to the cinema to see a film by Aldo Giovanni and Giacomo you seem to meet gods again old friends. For a while their respective paths went their separate ways but when they meet again time seems to have never passed: we rediscover the tastes we knew, the never vulgar comedy, the comfortable pleasure of a cinema that has managed to remain true to itself. Just as one expects from true friends: Giovanni is always the usual precisètti (with the «è» open, in the Milanese way), Giacomo the usual boring boy and Aldo the usual messy one in charge of dismantling the securities behind which the first two are entrenched.

The years have added a few more wrinkle and advised to avoid the more slapstick gags of the origins but we are always faced with the portrait of «a good and placid Italy, an enormous and boundless province» (to use Buccheri’s words) where the target of their barbs ended to focus on themselves, on theirs defects more than on the excesses of others. Accenting with this “The big day” a certain subterranean (and inevitable) melancholy but expunging that deadly shadow that was in the previous
“I hate summer”
. And if the laughter has never been uproarious, the fun never leaves the viewer.

This time the appointment is in the North, on a lake islet, where Giovanni has organised the marriage of his daughter Caterina (Margherita Mannino) with Elio (Giovanni Anzaldo), the son of the business partner Giacomo. The two fathers have known each other since elementary school and together they founded Segrate Arredi, specialized in sofas: the first thinks only of exaggerating – the catering entrusted to the maître (Pietro Ragusa) who has Lady Gaga among his clients, the ceremony officiated by a cardinal (Roberto Citran) – while the second is concerned with the accounts and with contrasting his psychosomatic pains.

The two respective wives – Valentina (Elena Lietti) for Giovanni and Lietta (Antonella Attili) for Giacomo – try to stem manias
and phobias of their respective spouses, but no one has come to terms with Giovanni’s first wife and Caterina’s mother, Margherita (Lucia Mascino) who shows up with her latest companion, theexuberant physical therapist Aldo, whose job seems to be to ruin everything. So in the three days of festivities planned, from Friday to Sunday, nothing will go as the meticulous Giovanni had imagined.

Without wishing to anticipate the a thousand ways in which Aldo will be able to ruin almost everything, it is worth emphasizing that if in the first part it seems to be in a sort of Italian «Hollywood Party», with Margherita’s companion who alternates between the role of the insipient Hrundi V. Bakshi and those of the alcoholic waiter who drains the drinks refused by the guests, in the second part to finish below the attacks of the trio will be quite a certain idea of bourgeois tranquillity, of placid routine unable to resist the many truths – half or whole – that will come to the surface. Forcing people to finally look each other in the face, sometimes even with the somewhat phoned help of the comments out loud of the various guests, whose gossip they seem to have almost only the function of making the viewer aware of what he would have had to understand otherwise.

Just as the words of the mountain priest (Francesco Brandi) that open and close the film are all too didactic. Sure, the three comedians (who wrote the screenplay with Davide Lantieri, Michele Pellegrino and the director Massimo Venier) do not have the badness of a Monicelli or the cynicism of a Dino Risi and not even thesociological intelligence of a Virzì (by the way: why not try to raise ambitions, as Ficarra and Picone did with Andò?), their world of reference tries to avoid thorns or low blowsbut the ways in which all the protagonists end up leaving the scene in the credits do not hide the bitterness of defeat and failure. To be taken always and in any case with a reassuring smilealthough this time a little tighter than usual.