I Hate Summer

The tenth film of Italy's best-known comic trio, Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo, and their sixth with Massimo Venier. Venier had last directed them in 2004; sixteen years separate the two, and all of the film's pull in Italy comes from that reunion. Three families rent the same holiday house for the same summer; an agency error has made all three contracts valid and nobody will leave. The three men are nothing alike: one orderly and fussy, one talkative and chaotic, one on the edge of bankruptcy. What follows is one house, one beach and a steadily rising intolerance. The comedy rests on a division of roles the trio has been building for thirty years, a language everybody inside Italy knows and nobody outside it does. It opened about a month before the pandemic reached Italy, passed three million euros in its first weekend and reached 7.5 million, making it the third biggest release of the year there. Who it is for: viewers who know Italian comedy and know the trio. Who it is not for: anyone who does not. Most of the jokes depend on personalities the audience is assumed to know, and from outside it looks like an ordinary holiday comedy.