A man's sacrifices for his brother in a tumultuous Italy told in a style that 
reconnects with Italian cinema in all its richness of emotion and command 
of expressive gesture.

Movie Review

GESTURES OF LOVE IN "WE LAUGHED"

With more emotion than narrative, director Gianni Amelio follows 
a man's sacrifices for his brother in a tumultuous Italy.

Los Angeles Times
By Kevin Thomas
Staff Writer
February 8 2002

To watch Gianni Amelio's luminous "The Way We Laughed" is to reconnect with 
Italian cinema in all its richness of emotion and command of expressive 
gesture.

In such widely acclaimed films as "Stolen Children" (1992) and "Lamerica" 
(1994), Amelio revealed that he was a superb artist who harkened back to the 
openhearted, socially conscious yet exquisitely subtle neo-Realist tradition 
of Vittorio De Sica, but here his style is elliptical as never before.

He deliberately leaves out sizable chunks of narrative, which emphasizes what 
is important to him while inviting us to fill in the blanks with our own 
conjectures. The ultimate effect is of a cumulative, heightened impact from a 
filmmaker who already was master at telling a wrenching tale. Amelio, his 
superb cinematographer Luca Bigazzi and evocative composer Franco Piersanti 
plunge us into a world in which darkness is as richly textured as light.

In the darkness the radiant face of Enrico Lo Verso comes into view. It is a 
face familiar to those who've seen "Stolen Children," in which he played a 
military man charged with transporting two small children to a distant 
orphanage only to develop a paternal love for them. In "Lamerica," he was a 
ruthless capitalist eager to exploit the fall of communism in Albania.

He's a little too gaunt to be truly handsome, which is a plus, for this makes 
it easier to identify with him as an ordinary guy who gets caught up in 
extraordinary circumstances.

"The Way We Laughed" unfolds in six sequences set between 1958 and 1964, a 
time of profound change as Italy was shifting, often painfully, from a 
society with a large agrarian population to one with an urban, industrialized 
base.

Lo Verso's Giovanni is a Sicilian peasant who has come to Turin to ensure 
that his younger brother Pietro (Francesco Giuffrida, an actor equal to the 
formidable Lo Verso), a student, gets the education that the illiterate 
Giovanni considers all-important in these changing times.

Giovanni, 12 years older than Pietro, has a paternal love that borders on 
obsessive.

No sacrifice is too great, no work too lowly; what Giovanni can't see is that 
Pietro, while bright, is indolent. Even when Giovanni realizes how poor a 
student Pietro has been, he is willing to help him at any cost.

Pietro is not, however, unmoved by his older brother's self-sacrificing love, 
but it threatens to suffocate him.

When Pietro disappears from Giovanni's life for awhile, we see Giovanni's 
survival skills. He all but unconsciously develops leadership and organizing 
skills that serve him well through various political upheavals. He has the 
stuff to succeed in a burgeoning economy and to develop the confidence to 
learn to read and write, while Pietro's destiny remains a question mark.

All the while Amelio is unobtrusively building "The Way We Laughed" toward a 
conclusion that evokes themes of corruption and redemption. The film's impact 
is shocking and charged with the full-bodied emotion seemingly so intrinsic 
to the Italian nature. This sweeping, confounding conclusion therefore 
unfolds with a beauty and an ease that seem truly organic. "The Way We 
Laughed" has that feeling of being a work of art.

*
Unrated. Times guidelines: The film has complex adult themes, some language 
and violence.

'The Way We Laughed'
Enrico Lo Verso...Giovanni
Francesco Giuffrida...Pietro
Fabrizio Gifuni...Pelaia, the educator
Rosaria Danze...Lucia

A New Yorker Films release. Writer-director Gianni Amelio. Producers Vittorio 
and Rita Cecchi Gori. Executive producer Mario Conte, Pacific Pictures. 
Cinematographer Luca Bigazzi. Editor Simona Paggi. Music Franco Piersanti. 
Costumes Gianna Gissi. Production designer Nello Georgetti. In Italian, with 
English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes.

Exclusively at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 
274-6869.