THE SALT OF LIFE

Gianni Di Gregorio's"Mid-August Lunch" was one of my cinema-going delights of the past few years. It was a 'little' film in which very little happened. A middle-aged man, played by the director and living with his ancient mother, is tasked with looking after a few other old ladies for the night. Next day he makes them all lunch and that, as they say, is that but there was a joie de vivre to the film rare in movies today.

In "The Salt of Life" the director again plays a middle-aged man, also called Gianni, and again with mother problems, (the magnificent 97 year old actress, Valeria De Franciscis Bendoni, who played his mother in "Mid-August Lunch", is again his mother here), who decides to have a final fling with a younger woman. Of course, things don't go according to plan.

As a writer and director, (and indeed as an actor), Di Gregorio has a wonderful Tatiesque sense of the vagaries of life. There is a lot of comedy in the small everyday things he encounters, and virtually no dramas at all. He is the gentlest of movie-makers and one of the most affectionate. Life may frustrate Gianni but he never lets it disturb him. He makes movies designed to make you smile and I grinned like the Cheshire Cat all the way through "The Salt of Life".

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