VALERIO MASTANDREA AND BARBORA BOBULOVA IN BALANCING ACT

A thin margin for the urban middle class man: "Divorce is for the rich"

Balancing Act (Gli equilibristi) is a sad one. Here is a hangdog side to the Italian male that foreigners may be surprised to see, having become accustomed to the fantasy of the dashing seductive charmer, the flashy dresser with the flashing eyes. But even Marcello Mastroianni had a hangdog side. Playing Giulio, Valerio Mastandrea, who won the Best Actor Davide, the Italian "Oscar" for this performance, is more of an average guy. He played the husband in Kim Rossi Stewart's fine and touching directing debut Anche libero va bene took so he's no stranger to difficult marriage dramas, though he's a comedian by trade. "The financial precariousness of middle-class life is thrown into dramatic relief in this powerful drama about life, love and family." Yes, this man has a brief infidelity, and his "northern" wife Elena (Barbora Bobulova) cannot learn to live with it, and so they must split, leaving the wife with the rocker girl daughter Camilla (the vibrant Rosabell Laurenti Sellers) and her little blond brother Luca (the sweet Lupo De Matteo) with the expensive retainer to correct his teeth.

Giulio is a city worker and Elena is a receptionist and they live in Rome, whose tough, funny, sometimes disreputable side is shown with no touristic facades here. Balancing Act is a process film and the process is a devolution. Giulio is a nice, restrained man, but also the victim of his occasional impulses. First is his infidelity with Stefania (Grazia Schiavo), not really a girlfriend, it seems, just a lonely lady with a dog who he spent some time with. One evening he has pity on a pizza man who brings the wrong order and the anchovies Elena can't eat push her over the edge. This wrong decision, taking somebody else's pizzas, leads to his expulsion. He stays with a friend at first, a single man tyrannized by his ancient "mamma." He must flee to other lodgings and the only thing he can afford is a prison-like pensione. But he can't afford that and before long he is sleeping in his car and eating at welfare stations to pay the double set of bills he's saddled with. He suffers a hundred humiliations, yet cannot succeed, and he deteriorates psychologically.

Balancing Act is a more downscale version of the story Silvio Soldini told in Days and Clouds -- how even well off middle class people can have their livelihoods kicked out from under them and slip into a marginal working class existence. This could be soap opera, melodrama, but what holds it, precariously, above that level are all the excellent performances and the writing that is precise about each social detail, in particular the personalities of salty Romans.

But though this film avoids becoming a soap or melo it's also certainly no neorealist masterpiece. Despite the good acting, the specific writing, nuanced mise-en-scène, and Vittorio Omodei Zorini’s subtle and inventive but not obtrusive camera, something seems missing, too monotonous. There is too little emotion, too much repression. This was released in France in February 2013, and the Paris critics were only mildly impressed (Alloociné's press rating is 3.0). One French critic felt we merely become voyeurs of a sadistic process of humiliation. Several suggested that Balancing Act, falls into a kind of miserabilism and finally does not go enough beyond the documentary, illustrative limits of its sociological tale. I feel this too: that there is too much detail and not enough art.

Gli equilibristi/Balancing Act, 107 mins., debuted at Venice 2012 and opened theatrically in Italy Sept. 2013 and France Feb. 2013. Screened for this review as part of the New Italian Cinema series of the San Francisco Film Society presented at the Clay Theater in San Francisco 14 Nov. 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.