20/10/2003 - Paolo Virzi is back with another great comedy. His new film shows a young girl from the provinces leaning about the vices and virtues of the big city

Paolo Virzi is back. After his trip to America with the 20 year-old Tanino, he’s come back home for Caterina in the city [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Be sure and watch the making of).
His young protagonist is uprooted from the small village where she was born and bred, and she leaves the rolling hills of her native Tuscany to be thrown headlong into the tumult of life in the Italian capital, where indifference reigns supreme and where power at school, just like in politics, is divided between the kids on the right and those on the left. She makes the big move along with her father Giancarlo/Sergio Castellitto, who teaches accounting and who is a big social climber, and her mother Agata/Margherita Buy, a provincial housewife with a simple soul.
And so, the little girl with a lost look of continual surprise in her eyes, finds herself right in the eye of the storm, experiencing many changes and new worlds to discover. Caterina is struck by the detachment of a city where people move around without looking at one another, but she copes with her new life with the same innocence that enables her to enter into apparently different worlds, like those of her classmates, and even though she is caught in a whirlwind of sometimes frightening people and events, she is protected by her simple and trusting nature.
Once again the Tuscan director shows many themes in this film, as he has done in his previous works: from the knowledgeable portrayal of the teenage world, to the difficulties of the adults struggling to find their own identity in the midst of a crowd, and the illustration of a wide variety of social situations. “For example Giancarlo, Caterina’s father” explained the director at a press conference held in Rome for the Italian release of the film “His desperate and painful restlessness represents a feeling that is very prevalent nowadays, namely his exclusion from the group of “those who know how to be in the world”, as he himself confirms during the film”.
There’s also the politician Manlio Germano, played by an excellent Claudio Amendola, who moves in the political circle “that has the responsibility of running the country” although even he is embarrassed by inappropriate displays of “fascist” pride from fellow politicians: somewhat like the intellectual from the opposing party, played by Galatea Ranzi or Flavio Bucci, who run the country in a different way.
“But the main idea behind the film was to show today’s Italy, in fact to be more precise today’s Rome, as seen through the innocent eyes of a young teenager” added Virzi “I didn’t want to talk about politics, I wanted to show the way a middle class family copes with life, for example the way Giancarlo is resentful about his reality, whereas Caterina has a naive but basically optimistic outlook”.
The film is produced by Cattleya and RAI Cinema and it cost €4m, It will be distributed in 150 prints by 01 Distribution, from October 24.

(Translated from Italian)