Mid-August Lunch
After making Gomorrah, a dark, ferocious Italian drama about Mafia crime, veteran actor/screenwriter Gianni di Gregorio and producer Matteo Garrone turned their energy to a new project.
Di Gregorio’s following directorial debut blew critics out of the water: it couldn’t possibly have been a greater contrast. It’s a light, incredibly subtle example of quintessential Italian film-making, a slow semi-autobiographical tale about tradition, respect, and the rewards and perils of being an Italian man living at home with your mum.
In the summer of 2000, di Gregorio, the only son of a strong-spirited widow, found himself presented with a deal. The manager of his housing complex in Rome offered to disregard some of the writer’s late payments if he would look after his mother for the August Ferragosto holiday.
“In a show of wounded self-dignity I refused,” said di Gregorio, “but since then I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I had accepted. This is the result.”
In Mid-August Lunch, his character (also Gianni) reluctantly agrees, with the guarded acceptance of his 90ish, live-in aristocratic mother. The manager treacherously delivers both his own mother and his aunt, and before long, the three women start to clash. Gianni, flustered, calls the doctor to check his angina, and the doctor’s aging mother becomes part of the 24-hour sleepover as well.
Faced with babysitting four women with a combined age of 350, all difficult in their own ways, in a very poky flat, Gianni turns on the duty and diligence that tradition demands. Using an ample supply of Chianti and a friend as his emotional crutches, he cooks and tends, worries about their health, spikes their camomile tea, and embarks on a late-night search when one woman sneaks out for a bit of furtive fun.
The audience is fed morsels of Italian culture and little tidbits of reminiscence, loneliness, vulnerability, strength, and enduring sprit, but the meal itself (and there’s a lot of reference to food) is to be found Gianni’s growing pleasure in his task and in the relationships that develop between the characters.
The film is amazingly naturalistic in its approach, and no wonder. Di Gregorio spurned professional actresses and cast four “ordinary” women—one a family friend, another his own aunt—based on their strength of character.
“The doctor and the friend from Trastevere really are my childhood friends, playing themselves. As for me, I played the leading role because when we were preparing the film, while I was explaining to the crew that we needed to find a middle-aged man, more or less an alcoholic, who had lived for years with his mother, I realised that all eyes were turned to me.”
Shot on location in the old flat di Gregorio shared with his mother in the 90s, the film cost less than 500,000 euros (NZ$969,400), the price of a high-end Golden Bay waterfront property. The average US movie costs NZ$500 million.
Younger audiences aren’t likely to appreciate the very slow pace and reflections on tradition. Nothing is brash and in-your-face; we’re more often asked rather than told what a scene’s intentions are. Young viewers may also struggle with the reverence unquestioningly extended to elders, and with the strange contrasts in conversation: One moment these women are paragons of mannerly virtue, the next they’re bluntly honest to the point of insult. For older viewers it may be a breath of fresh air.
The Ferragosto holiday is significant. Long appropriated as the day Catholics commemorate the Assumption of Mary, Ferragosto was originally a Roman feast to celebrate ripe harvests and the end of long labour in the fields. If you enjoy simple, affirming, naturalistic human tales, then there are rewards in this testament to realism, spontaneity and aging with dignity.
Maria Polglase
mid-august lunch (PG). The next screening at The Village Theatre will be held on Saturday 6 March, 8pm.
