The article was originally published at allography on August 25th, 2010.
You don’t need me to tell you that the job market is a nightmare. A dry-dream. A your dog just got killed, your teeth are crumbling, everyone hates you nightmare. This being the case, you’d think I wouldn’t feel too badly about narrowly missing out on an awesome job. But when it happened recently, I felt like lukewarm light beer–awful.
It didn’t help that I was in my hometown (as a visitor) for a late-summer wedding. Getting bad news on someone else’s computer just makes the it all feel worse. My blue Gateway laptop my be a wheezing hunk of debris (please don’t break) but at least it’s comforting with its familiar smudged screen and scalding exhaust fan.
So there I was, in Bloomington, Illinois, alone while the wedding party went to rehearse the nuptial procedures and other friends hadn’t arrived yet. Alone and an increasingly darkening shade of blue because another opportunity to get back in the black went awry.
Enter that bastion of cinema delights: the nearby Normal Theater. I’ve written before, briefly, about this theater. I volunteered there from the ages of 10 (shh, don’t tell anyone) to 23 and was introduced to the many splendors of foreign, silent, classic, and independent films.
The first movie I saw there was Vertigo.
The first one I volunteered at was Gone with the Wind.
The first movie that scared me enough to walk out was The Birds (I was 11, gimme a break).
The first movie that I despised enough to walk out was Doctor Zhivago (zither music, shudder).
Oh Hitchcock. Oh Metropolis. Oh Caddyshack.
So, anyway, I carted my dragging ass over there, caught up with the managers, Cliff and Dawn, and bought my popcorn and Pepsi (for one dollar each!!!). Showtime.
The film showing that evening was a slender (75 minutes) Italian slice-of-life called Mid-August Lunch that languored on food and friendship.
The plot’s compact. An unmarried man, Gianni, lives with his 93 year-old mother in a small apartment in Rome. Gianni’s late on paying the bills and the administrator of the apartment complex offers to strike the debts if Gianni will watch his 90 year-old mother. Gianni agrees and, in short order and against his will, the one elderly feminine visitor turns into two, then three. Stuck with entertaining four boisterous Roman grandmothers over the traditional Italian mid-August holiday, Gianni sets about corralling the grand dames with wine glass in hand. Hijinks ensue.
The plot, compact though it is, moves along at a leisurely pace, the camera resting comfortably on Gianni’s ever-present vino, the four ladies’ creased faces, the tiny colorful rooms of the apartment, and the narrow streets of Rome. There’s no hurry to rush past the long opening scene of Gianni reading The Three Musketeers to his mother or a later discussion about how a macaroni casserole is made.
Usually when films shuffle along, I’ll shout at the screen, “Get on with it already!” But not this time.
Scenes progress naturally, sauntering in time to an earthy cadence. This could be because Gianni Di Gregorio, who wrote, directed, and starred as “Gianni”, also shot the film in the same cramped apartment he lived in with his own mother. He used non-actors as the four elderly women–a ploy that worked maybe because I was too busy reading the subtitles to focus on their line deliveries or because the women were playing themselves in all their gregarious glory.
Either way, it was wonderful to watch Valeria (the home-team matriarch), Marina (the obstinate, flirtatious administrator’s mother), Aunt Maria (the administrator’s reserved culinary wiz aunt), and Grazia (the final, eternally hungry, woman) interact in conversation and argument, always ready to chastise or hug each other.
They become fast friends and Gianni, wearied by two days of cooking, coaxing, and commanding the apartment, perpetually wears a face of bemused agony. He can’t wait to clear the house of elderly Italian women, but is ultimately struck by the power of companionship (and a bribe) and lets the women stay on to enjoy his cooking and each other’s company.
It’s a simple movie but it resists the artificial sentimentality that goes down like a fistful of artificial sweetener. Watching Gianni hunt down ingredients for the next meal, crack open a bottle of wine, and cook in the midst of close friends is just as pleasant as doing it yourself. Unless you’re a fast-food junkie or have no friends. Then you wouldn’t have a frame of reference and will just have to trust me.
Anyway, I came out of the theater smiling, which is a better reaction than special effects and mega-watt stars can usually muster out of me. So, cheers to Mid-August Lunch. Cheers to the cinema.
Boo still to the skeletal job market, but a slightly less angry boo this time.
FADE OUT 