Sorry for the Delay

Vincenzo is a man in Naples who keeps postponing his own life. Things with his girlfriend never move forward, his friend Tonino's marriage is collapsing, his family keeps asking what he intends to do, and he gives all of them the same answer: in a minute. The title says exactly that. Massimo Troisi directs and stars, in his second film as director. Lello Arena, his partner from the Naples cabaret years, plays Tonino. Giuliana De Sio is also in the cast. Troisi's cinema runs on Neapolitan dialect, and so does its humour: a way of speaking that never finishes a sentence, keeps retreating, changes its mind mid thought. Outside Italy this is close to untranslatable, which is why his films travelled so little. Inside Italy the outcome was different. It was among the most watched domestic releases of the 1983-84 season. Troisi died of heart failure in 1994, immediately after finishing Il Postino, and the world came to know him mainly through that film. In Italy the beloved work is this: the Naples comedies of the early eighties. Who it is for: anyone who wants to know Italian comedy, and specifically its Neapolitan branch. Who it is not for: do not look for plot. The film is almost entirely talk, and in subtitles half the joke stays behind in the language.