Film: A Perfect Day
Release date: 4th October 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 101 mins
Director: Ferzan Ozpetek
Starring: Valerio Mastandrea, Isabella Ferrari, Monica Guerritore, Nicole Grimaudo, Valerio Binasco
Genre: Drama
Studio: Vita
Format: DVD
Country: Italy
Based on Italian writer Melania Mazzucco’s popular novel of the same title, A Perfect Day is a powerful feature from distinguished director Ferzan Ozpetek. The film features a strong ensemble cast spread across several narrative threads, including a 2008 Venice Film Festival Best Actress winning turn by Isabella Ferrari.
In the city of Rome, Antonio (Valerio Mastandrea) is a bodyguard for a high ranking Italian MP. He has been separated from his wife Emma (Isabella Ferrari) for about a year, yet refuses to accept that his marriage is over. Antonio’s increasing desperation following the seeming loss of his family embroils Emma and their innocent children in his destructive descent, characterising the breakdown of a family unit in an occasionally violent and shocking manner.
In a parallel plot point, Antonio’s boss Elio Fioravanti (Valerio Binasco) tries frantically to save his political career, unaware that his young trophy wife is falling in love with his own son from his first marriage. Then there is Mara, a lonely and complicated teacher who re-discovers her long lost love…
A Perfect Day is a film about relationships, or, more to the point, the often strained and difficult relationships between family members who have grown apart. Director Ozpetek focuses mainly on the story of the estranged Antonio and Emma, and it is this plot strand that sustains the film.
In the central female role, Isabella Ferrari excels in her portrayal of Emma and indeed was a deserved recipient of the Venice Festival Best Actress award. Ferrari conveys subtle heartbreak and growing despair in her performance as the film progresses, especially as Mastandrea’s Antonio increases his desperate attempts to win back his spouse in damaging psychological and physical ways (including a brutal attempted rape).
In the role of Antonio, Mastandrea is both suitably menacing and emotionally troubling in his portrayal. His character’s progression in the 24 hour setting of the film, from a psychological perspective, is a classic case of ‘from bad to worse’, where Mastandrea does an effective job of showing the heightened danger of a man who feels he has nothing more to lose. Equally, special mention must be made of the central child performances in the film. Valentina (Nicole Murgia) and Kevin (Gabriele Paolino) are the pawns in Antonio’s deranged attempts to regain Emma’s trust, where the innocence of the children (particularly in the spirited and upbeat case of Kevin) contrasts greatly with their father’s distorted sense of marital injustice.
Yet part of the problem with A Perfect Day lies in the effective (if occasionally slipping into melodramatic) performances of the main family unit plot thread. The film is perhaps too ambitious in following different narrative threads, and therefore the subplots involving Antonio’s boss Elio Fioravanti (Binasco) and family, in addition to another separate subplot relating to Valentina’s school teacher Mara, aren’t anywhere near as compelling as the tribulations of Emma and Antonio. While the subplots do have some clever interweaving narrative elements, and similarities with the main plot alongside similar familial themes, they are on the whole rather forgettable and somewhat pointless when they move away from the most gripping central relationships.
Ozpetek’s film is an extraordinarily bleak look at 24 hours in the relationships of two families in crisis, with Antonio’s violence towards his estranged wife and manipulation of his children highly disturbing. While this is undoubtedly effective in showing the strains of a broken relationship and the menace of a man clearly on the edge of a breakdown, it does make the film somewhat tough to watch. Additionally, the drama of the events in the 24 hours covered in the film does slip into melodrama in an almost TV soap opera way. The much heralded explosive ending (foreshadowed at the beginning of the film with a dazzling Hitchcockian tracking shot of the winding stairway to Antonio’s flat) is unfortunately rather predictable, although it successfully underlines the film’s overwhelmingly bleak tone.
With some fine central performances from Valerio Mastandrea and the award-winning Isabella Ferrari, Ferzan Ozpetek’s film adaptation of A Perfect Day is an interesting if overambitious film that just doesn’t quite work as a whole. Redundant subplots and a relentlessly bleak outlook make this a tough watch even during its most interesting central focus of a family in meltdown. DB
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