The Salt of Life: Review By harveycritic

THE SALT OF LIFE (Gianni e le donne)

Zeitgeist Films

Reviewed for MovieWeb by Harvey Karten

Grade: B

Director: Gianni Di Gregorio

Screenwriter: Gianni Di Gregorio, Valerio Attanasio

Cast: Gianni Di Gregorio, Valeria de Franciscis Bendoni, Alfonso Santagata, Elisabetta Piccolomini, Valeria Cavalli, Alyn Prandi, Kristina Cepraga, Michelangelo Ciminale, Teresa Di Gregorio, Lilia Silvi, Gabriella Sborgi, Laura Squizzato, Silvia Squizzato

Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 2/21/12

Opens: March 2, 2012

The expression "Dirty old man" deserve to be sent to the scrap heap of all politically incorrect talk, including ethnic, religious, racial and age-ist epithets. Older people, patronizingly called senior citizens in the U.S., have feelings like the young, emotions which are particularly frustrating since folks over fifty enjoy the romantic attentions of youths only if they're loaded. Otherwise, as Gianni Di Gregorio, co-writer, director and principal performer in "The Salt of Life" notes, they're invisible. If a sixty-year-old man such as Gianni Di Gregorio in the role of Gianni Di Gregorio wants to be looked in the eye by young women, he must do favors for them such as walk their dogs or pick up their groceries. The women are all too happy to "use" him and he, being a pensioner since he was fifty and seemingly without a hobby, volunteers the time on his hands to run errands. A mamma's boy, he is on the alert whenever his mother asks for favors as well.

Gianni Di Gregorio, whose "Mid-August Lunch" finds the writer-director-actor taking in a condo administrator's mother and aunt in order to relieve some of his debt, is a late middle-aged fellow there as well, a wine-drinking retiree who is looking for a surprise or two in his life which this arrangement might just provide. "The Salt of Life," not a follow-up or a picture requiring its audience to be familiar with that 2008 movie, is wistful rather than comic or heavily dramatic. Its beauty lies in the naturalism that the director insists upon, creating characters who really talk the way people in real life do. All performers are given their own names as those of their characters. The success of this arthouse film, which is likely to attract mostly an older demographic, depends on Di Gregorio's charm: he comes across evoking the requisite interest from us despite the pronounced bags under the eyes, the lack of energy in his walk, the sympathy derived from those of us in our movie chairs who just might identify with the fellow.

The women in Gianni's life include his wife (Elisabetta Piccolomini), to whom he caters with breakfast in bed but does not provide even the most basic romantic interest; his college-student daughter (Teresa Di Gregorio, who is the director's real-life girl); his 96-year-old mother (Valeria de Franciscis Bendoni who is that age in real life and who is bankrupting her son); his mom's caretaker, Cristina (Kristina Cepraga); and a pair of hot, fun-loving twin blondes whom he has just met (Laura Squizzato and Silvia Squizato). For one reason or another, the women are unavailable. One must get up early to catch a plane to Paris, another had invited him over on a Sunday but spends the whole day practicing vocals with a young pianist. And so it goes. He rejects the suggestion of his women-seeking lawyer friend Alfonso (Alfonso Santagata) to go to a bordello. In the end, his daughter's live-in, unemployed boyfriend, Michelangelo (Michelangelo Ciminale), asks him what's on his mind, at which point Gianni's fantasies open up on the big screen.

Photographer Gogò Bianchi takes his camera to Travestere, a part of Rome rarely seen in the movies despite being in the heart of the city, and to the villa owned by Di Gregorio's aristocratic mother, all joining to provide the right audience with a picture of an older man's unfulfilled desires.

Unrated. 90 minutes (c) 2012 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online