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Recall your worst break-up, with all the unjustifiable whining,
irrational resentments, jealousies and petulant pleas attendant.
Now imagine reliving 115 minutes of such misery. Thus is The
Last Kiss, the story of a bunch of bullshit artists whose
relationships are entirely ripped from melodramatic confrontations
from old-school soap operas, so unironic as to be positively
pre-Douglas Sirk in their unwinking seriousness. Here,
all the characters suffer from a chronic inability to distinguish
between the serious and the trivial, the temporary irritant
and true problems, and their response is to treat everything
as an apocalyptic crisis, shrilling their way to catharsis.
Following roughly three parallel stories, writer/director
Gabriele Muccino attempts to interweave different generations
to demonstrate the same lesson three times over. Carlo (Accorsi),
about to get married to pregnant girlfriend Giulia (Mezzogiorno),
fears commitment and being tied down, and does what comes
naturally to virile young Italian men in melodrama: He falls
for an 18-year-old girl. Meanwhile, his college buddies, all
mired in repetitive existences and meaningless jobs, plan
to ride, in the most clichéd manner, off into the sunset—on
a camper to a rugged, more manly existence. Finally, Giulia’s
mother, Anna, (Sandrelli, trading in her status as
a beauty in films like The Conformist for the realities
of aging, her persona aging along with her character) decides,
not for the first time, to leave her uncaring husband and
strike out on her own, “living life to the fullest.”
It’s Anna who best represents the movie’s whole problem:
Aspiring to a realistic and mature portrait of the disappointments
and failings of long-term relationships, The Last Kiss
revolves around characters who seem to have learned everything
they know about treating their partner from watching only
the shrillest, unhappiest break-ups of cinematic yore. They
throw blunt objects at each other, they speak in grand clichés
about eternal commitments and unbounded freedom, they even
threaten each other with knives—anything rather than make
a mature, fully thought through decision or—horrors—do something
we haven’t seen in a movie before. Worse, they don’t do so
because they’re genuinely confused and misguided, but because
Muccino’s getting ready to present a moral: Long-term commitments
are The Goal. And so Anna, after spouting grand rhetoric about
“starting her life all over again” and similar nonsense, returns,
tail between her legs, to her husband to settle in for another
30 years and a quiet, peaceful death (which, in fact, is specified
as the goal). All the couples must come together, no matter
how unhappy and divided, except for the college buddies, who
actually do ride off into the sunset for an equally hackneyed
ending.
Despite the unrelievedly over-the-top tone which characterizes
the proceedings, The Last Kiss is an impressive technical
achievement. The steadicam cinematography is dizzying, with
ultra-long takes sending the camera all over the place, as
elaborately choreographed wedding and birthday parties move
in meticulously timed arrangements (though Muccino’s decision
to not use overlapping sound makes it rather obvious at times
that many are just waiting for their cue). The actors inhabit
their stereotypes with vigor, giving all their lung power
in service of a louder, more emotional world (as does the
ceaseless score, which in the worst Hollywood fashion provides
a reaction cue for every single moment, in the musical equivalent
of a laugh track). Still, it’s ultimately wearying: If these
characters were half as smart as their clothing, their behavior
wouldn’t be so consistently false and shrill, which doesn’t
have anything but the most trivial motivation. Failing completely
on a human level, The Last Kiss remains one of the
more watchably brisk moralistic imports of recent years.
—Vadim Risov
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out
of 5
While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
