"The Best of Youth"

"The Best of Youth" -- the title comes from a collection of poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini -- skips like a flat, smooth stone across Italy's recent past, glancing off notable events like the flooding of Florence (after which students converged upon the city, volunteering their time to salvage precious books and manuscripts) and capturing the sense of dread instigated by the Red Brigade terrorist attacks of the 1970s. The screenplay, by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, uses events during those years as reflective surfaces for the lives of the story's numerous characters. It's not just Matteo and Nicola who grow up during the course of "The Best of Youth"; the country itself, suffering through Mafia assassinations and periods of massive social unrest, endures its share of growing pains, too. Giordana folds it all into his luxuriously expansive vision. Like the best long novels, "The Best of Youth" is both compact and languorous; it becomes part of our lives during the hours we spend watching it, and afterward, its characters linger in the memory, as if we ourselves have become part of their adoptive family.

Although the picture addresses certain aspects of childhood -- particularly in terms of Nicola's relationship with his daughter, Sara (played by three different actresses, Sara Pavoncello, Greta Cavuoti and Camilla Filippi) -- it isn't fixated on the way our childhood years shape us. Maybe that's part of why it's so effective, and so affecting: In "The Best of Youth," youth isn't wasted on the young -- this is a study in the ways in which we continue to grow after we've become adults.

As the movie opens, we don't know quite what to make of Nicola and Matteo. Nicola has worked hard in school because he's had to -- his good grades haven't come easily. Yet he isn't ready to become an adult and join the workforce. There's something both tentative and searching about him: Even if he embodies, to an extent, the youthful restlessness of the '60s (in the midst of his wandering, he becomes a woodworker in Norway, falling in love with the landscape and the people there), he's neither flaky nor careless with other people's feelings.

There's something essentially dignified, almost grave, about Nicola as a young man. The marvel of Lo Cascio's performance is how he manages to make Nicola seem less careworn, and lighter-spirited, as he ages, even as his personal difficulties and heartaches mount. It's a lovely performance, a testament to the way we grow the most after we think we've stopped growing. And Lo Cascio's features -- his intensely focused eyes, a nose that's a little too sharp for the friendly openness of his smile -- become more interesting the more you look at them. By the movie's end, he has become so familiar to us that it hurts to say goodbye to him.

If Nicola is the movie's sun, then Matteo is its luminous, mysterious moon. There are some things about Matteo that are never explained: He clearly likes girls, but a tender (though not overtly sexual) encounter he has with a transvestite hooker hints at complex layers that can't be easily parsed. We never fully understand why the thoughtful, exceedingly sensitive Matteo becomes first a soldier and later a policeman and detective. And despite his stoic masculine handsomeness, he sometimes seems too fragile for the world around him, let alone the peculiar roughness of his profession.

As a detective, part of his job is to photograph crime scenes, and while it seems like distressing work, we get a sense of the sorrowful fulfillment he gets from it: It's as if he feels he can somehow redress the injustices of the world by bearing witness to them through the lens. Alessio Boni gives Matteo just the right amount of opacity -- even if Matteo is always a bit of a mystery to us, Boni lets enough light through so that we always find it easy to care for him. And the tentative romance he begins with a young photographer, Mirella (Maya Sansa), has a delicate but intense quality. It's also a twist that will figure prominently in the movie's ending -- and a way of clarifying for us the nature of the brothers' fractured but indelible relationship.

I've barely touched on the intricacies of "The Best of Youth" -- the way it weaves a complex, textured tapestry of relationships between siblings, the way it deals with the difficulties of accepting our parents as human beings, the way it captures the desolation of grief. This is a modest yet generous work: It never strains to be a work of art; instead, it humbly acknowledges that, even in the course of six hours, it can capture only a small corner of the range of human experience.

Even so, its look is satisfyingly, though subtly, cinematic: Director of photography Roberto Forza shoots the faces of these characters as if they were landscapes, full of mystery and majesty, and they fill up the screen as completely as we could wish. Though "The Best of Youth" was made for the small screen (and probably works just fine on it), in some ways a TV screen is too small to hold it. This is an intimate work about the vastness of life.

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