When I first heard about this movie I got very excited: it doesn't happen every day to have a little city like Genova featuring in an international production, and, as a resident of this very city, I felt the right to boast a slight sense of revenge against other, more celebrated, Italian cities (to put things in perspective, Genova is often overlooked by Italian medias and by the powers that be, despite having the second biggest and busiest harbour in Europe). This until I actually managed to watch the movie. Just to avoid this post to become an unmitigated rant, I have to say that the movie itself it's not half bad...but when you name your work after a city, you're at least expected to have a faint grasp on what the whole place is about. Instead we get a trite bunch of clichés about Italy: tanned guys teasing young girls while zooming along on mopeds - people here, both old and young,barely acknowledge your presence until you bump into them - ...then the same guys roaming through the city in a huge, motorcycle-mounted pack... - never seen anything like that -...and then a little bit more of the same guys goofing on the beach... It looks like the director had spent three months in Rome or Naples before he decided to have a slightly left field take on it and to choose a less renowned city as a setting for his work, maybe to appeal to the more "indie"-oriented part of the audience. Pity he didn't manage to get anything out of the place's soul: some really awful Italians B-movies from the 70s give you a fairer rendition of the city than this movie could ever dream of. Anyway, I wouldn't be so riled about that if it wasn't for the director waxing lyrical, in interviews with local newspapers, about how much he loved the city and how he succeeded in transposing its heart and soul on the screen. Again, not a bad a film, but you could have it called with any generic Mediterranean city name and nobody would notice!
