Italian director Gabriele Muccino brings us a family of four on the point of mutual destruction.
All the members of the family -- husband, wife, seventeen-year-old daughter and slightly younger son -- are searching for confidence and self-esteem. This is an extravagant family in which no member has time to help each other. All their needs must be found outside the group.
The mother, Guilia (Laura Morante), seeks relief from frustration and boredom by attempting to renew her early career as an actor. Daughter Valentina (Nicoletta Romanoff) attempts to fulfil her life's dream, of becoming a scantily-clad singing and dancing hostess on a television quiz-show. The son Paolo (played by the director's younger brother Silvio Muccino) attempts to resolve his rotten love-life. Masturbation just isn't enough.
Then there's the ostensible head of the family, Carlo (Fabrizio Bentivoglio). He's in a mid-management position in advertising or marketing. But he's also a frustrated writer, who has been sitting on his unfinished first-novel for something like 20 years. His unresolved ambitions come to a head when, at a party, he meets up with a former girlfriend, Alessia (Monica Belucci). Their unfinished business gets wrapped up with his unresolved creative urge, in an explosive mess of anguished sex.
While Valentina tries to screw her way into a television quiz-show career and Paolo tries to buy love and friendship with a bagfull of dope, the parents fight their own private and connected battles. For the most part, none of the protagonists know what the others are simultaneously going through -- not until the husband's dramas reach breaking-point.
It's a highly dramatic but also very subtle drama, and its ambiguous resolution is itself both wry and masterly.
The transfer isn't exactly your sparkling demo-quality print, but it is very serviceable, with very few artefacts of any kind. It's just that the quality doesn't scream 'look at me' the way the best DVD productions can.
Sound is loud, spread across a mainly central stage with good clarity for both music and dialogue.
The main extra feature is a 36-minute Making Of documentary which gives a few interesting insights into the production, without being really compelling viewing in its own right. Then there are four deleted scenes, which again don't seem to contribute much at all.
During an extra feature, director Gabriele Muccino relates how the astonishingly beautiful Nicoletta Romanoff virtually walked into the role of daughter Valentina as a result of her outstanding audition. The most interesting special feature of all on this disc is that actual audition. And Muccino can't be blamed for hiring her on the spot.
There's another audition, for either the son or his girlfriend, or both. We're not told which one is trying out for the role. It hardly matters; it's just a disc-filler.
Then there's a 15-minute interview with the director, which adds a bit more background to this film and his career, and the final extras are three theatrical trailers, for Since Otar Left, Facing Windows and Tom White.