Though The Best Of Youth runs six hours, it's no insult to say that the film's most resonant element may be the passing of time—37 years, to be exact—and the dramatic shifts in historical and personal events that can shape individuals and give birth to successive generations. As it marches confidently from one decade to the next, Marco Tullio Giordana's expansive yet intimate epic registers the full weight of human experience, the sad and wondrous places that appear on life's circuitous journey. Some of the gradually aging characters lead more charmed lives than others, but adversity bears down on everyone at one point or another, and it's fascinating to see how each person processes disappointment and tragedy, or how they go about pursuing their wayward passions. Set against a tumultuous national backdrop—from the winter floods in 1966 Florence to the Red Brigades terror to the anti-Mafia movement in Sicily—The Best Of Youth is a big, family-style Italian dinner, catered to the broadest tastes, yet satisfying all the same.
Originally formatted as a miniseries for Italian television, where it could avoid the distribution headaches that kept it out of American theaters for too long, The Best Of Youth has the absorbing quality of a long, sure-handed popular novel. Beginning with an average middle-class family in '66 Rome, Giordana focuses most intently on two brothers: Luigi Lo Cascio, a level-headed student studying to be a doctor, and Alessio Boni, a fiercely intelligent brooder whose peculiar impulses lead him to drop out of school and join the Army. After meeting a beautiful and politically radical music student (Sonia Bergamasco) in Florence, Lo Cascio decides to follow her to the University Of Turin, where he gets involved in fierce labor protests. Meanwhile, Boni grows more withdrawn and unstable, especially after a close Army comrade is paralyzed while trying to staunch a protest. Though their lives follow wildly divergent paths, both geographically and ideologically, the brothers remain close, and their decisions figure strongly in determining each other's futures.
Expanding out from the two brothers, Giordana and his superb cast bring vivid life to at least a dozen more roles, any one of which would justify another movie. Taken alone, a subplot about Bergamasco's misbegotten association with the Red Brigades—which she chooses over a comfortable life with Lo Cascio and their infant daughter—could be spun off into an early Costa-Gavras thriller. On a certain level, The Best Of Youth seems too much like good TV: utterly engrossing, yet a little puny in thematic ambitions, unable to gaze that far beyond its characters' noses. But aside from a few sentimental missteps, Giordana has created a hearty, complete picture of a family over a long stretch of years that seem—in spite of the film's intimidating length—to last the blink of an eye. (Note: The Best Of Youth will be screened in two three-hour installments with separate admissions.)