Somebody to Love

An Italian romantic comedy. Piero and Lara meet in a bar and arrange their first date at her flat. Lara is thirty-five, restores furniture and keeps entering relationships with no future. Piero is fifty, teaches at a secondary school and has a run of disappointments behind him. The idea is that the inside of both their heads is put on screen. There are four voices inside Piero: the rational one, the romantic one, the one driven by desire and the one tired of everything. There are four inside Lara too, and they argue among themselves as well. Separate actors play these inner voices on a separate set. So although the date looks like an evening between two people, it is really an argument among ten. The narrative spans a single evening and takes place almost entirely in one flat. Edoardo Leo plays Piero and Pilar Fogliati plays Lara. The inner voices include Marco Giallini, Claudia Pandolfi, Emanuela Fanelli, Vittoria Puccini and Claudio Santamaria. Paolo Genovese directed; he had made a single-setting film about a gathering before. It runs ninety-seven minutes. An enjoyable production for anyone who likes Italian comedy and narratives built on a formal idea. For a viewer expecting a new idea, the device of showing inner voices has been used before and the film does not take it anywhere different.