Turné

A film set on a theatre tour in Italy. Dario and Federico have been friends since school. Both are thirty-five, both are actors, and they set out on tour together. The play is Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. They will start in the south and work north from town to town. The journey is by van. Small halls, empty seats, cheap hotels and roadside restaurants. Then Vittoria joins them. She left Federico not long ago and he does not know she is now with Dario. From there the film moves in a closed space. Three people in the same vehicle, the same hotel and the same stage. The tension rises slowly. Nobody raises the subject; everyone buries it in jokes, rehearsal and daily business. What the narrative is interested in is not the triangle but a generation: all three are in their mid thirties and none has built the life they wanted. The play and their lives keep crossing. The lines they speak on stage describe the situation outside it, and the film uses that without overdoing it. The halls are empty. The narrative also shows the state of provincial theatre; the audience does not come, payments are late, and the tour barely holds together. This is the director's fourth film and sits in the middle of a trilogy he built around escape. The film was shown in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. Diego Abatantuono, Laura Morante and Fabrizio Bentivoglio are in the cast. Gabriele Salvatores directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes road films and stories about relationships set around theatre. Who it is not for: anyone expecting incident; the film consists almost entirely of three people talking.