June 4, 2023 | Rome, Italy

Viaggio Segreto

By |2018-03-21T18:21:36+01:00February 1st, 2006|Reviews|

1.5

Date: 2006

Director: Roberto Andó

Starring: Marco Baliani, Alessio Boni, Donatella Finocchiaro

A

good Italian cast is doomed by cinema mattone, with an awful script sinking director Roberto Andó’s movie. A dysfunctional family in Sicily collides with disaster when mom seems inclined to set up an Oedipus scenario. She is shot. Dad does time, but he didn’t do it. That leaves brother Leo and sister Ale to stick a little too closely together in Rome.

Brother becomes a psychiatrist and delves into pasts. Sister has a new artist beau Harold who moves ahead by ignoring his own past. Harold wants to buy back their childhood home for Ale as a nice surprise engagement present. Leo doesn’t concur. At least the real estate Anna agent seems normal. Few landscape shots of Sicily, so no hope there to compensate for suffocating interiors.

All that came to mind at the end was the off-color West Virginia joke, “If I divorce my husband, will he still be my brother?” Egad, skip it.

About the Author:

Judy Edelhoff launched and became producer of a series of prestigious lectures on history, politics, arts and culture televised nationally from the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Previously worked in for the Folger Shakespeare Library. In Rome, she served as Special Assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. Her interest in cuisine has included collaboration with Italian chefs and master chefs, including the prestigious French Laundry in Napa Valley. She is a native Floridian and later Washington, D.C. resident.