Genova - film review
Genova begins with a flashback to the car accident that kills Marianne, leaving Joe (Colin Firth) an emotionally inadequate widower caring for his two daughters. This defining moment sets the context for the consequent tale of coping and coming to terms with loss.
Regrettably, no adequate explanation is given of the circumstances under which Marianne might have met her death protected within the rigid steel safety cage of a Volvo V70, equipped with side impact protection system, front and side airbags, inflatable curtain and whiplash protection system. From this unsatisfactory opening the film struggles to recover any credibility.
The bare bones of the narrative are that a few months after Marianne’s death an old flame from Harvard days arranges a teaching post for Joe at the University of Genoa and helps the family settle in, after which Joe plus daughters Kelly and Mary follow generally separate paths around Genoa as they attempt to come to terms with the loss of their wife/mother.
The subject Joe teaches remains unclear. His classes appear to consist in social chit-chat with assorted students at such a trivial level as to make media studies appear a rigorous discipline, including laugh-out-loud lines such as “Has the Euro had any impact on a sense of Italian identity?” Fortunately the classroom scenes are kept mercifully brief.
The selection of Firth to play a repressed Englishman might seem an obvious casting choice, but such is the extent to which his career is defined by one role that it comes as something of a surprise to find Mr Darcy sitting in an aeroplane, rustling up a bowl of linguini or lounging on a Mediterranean beach.
The current vogue for hand-held camera work is overindulged and serves only to detract; the sound quality (or possibly the actors’ diction) is often poor.
Implausible.