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ROME 2024

Review: Here Now

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- With his 13th film, Gabriele Muccino signs his first action thriller, following a young American woman on holiday in Italy who turns her life upside down over the course of one night

Review: Here Now
Elena Kampouris and Saul Nanni in Here Now

Presented at the 19th Rome Film Fest in the Grand Public section, the new film by Gabriele Muccino, Here Now, begins like a love story under the sun of Sicily, but soon turns into an action thriller, until its very last moments. The director behind The Last Kiss and Kiss Me Again [+see also:
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, lent for a long time to Hollywood (where he shot, amongst others, The Pursuit for Happyness and Seven Pounds), now and for the first time measures himself against a genre high in adrenaline, in which his proverbial style of direction of actors (“Gabriele is a director who gets agitated, sweats, shouts at you”, says one of them) adds frenzy to frenzy, reaching almost extreme levels.

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Written with Paolo Costella, already his collaborator for the more recent films There Is No Place Like Home [+see also:
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and The Best Years [+see also:
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, the film explores the dangerous drifts of the desire for adventure and for a challenge with oneself. The protagonist is a Californian girl in her 20s, Sophie (New York actress Elena Kampouris), recovering from a great pain and who, on her last day of holiday in Italy, decides to go to the sea for a swim (we are in Palermo, in Sicily) rather than accompany her sister Rachel (Ruby Kammer), passionate about art, to visit yet another cathedral. This is the first of a long series of choices that the young woman will make over the following 24 hours, against one and all, and which will turn her life upside down. On a high rock for dizzying dives, she meets the beautiful and seductive Giulio (Saul Nanni) and his friends Komandante (Lorenzo Richelmy), Samba (Enrico Inserra) and Sprizz (Francesco Garilli), a group of boys from the area who aren’t really recommendable, but who win Sophie over with their friendliness and audacity. The girl, who has meanwhile fallen for Giulio, decides to spend her last hours in Italy with them and to live, at whatever the cost, the most adrenaline-filled night of her life – a night during which all kinds of things truly happen.

Inspired by After Hours by Martin Scorsese (“a film that has chased me for years”, declares the director), Here Now definitely keeps you glued to your seat. The at once hyper vibrant and painful parable of this young woman is intriguing, as she continually pushes the limit of risk in order to get out of her emotional cage. It is also interesting to see how the border between good and evil, licit and illicit, can be blurred, and how it might be easier than we think to find oneself on the wrong side. With a little more sense of proportion (it’s not always necessary to scream to communicate enthusiasm or fear), and while it is not perfect regarding the credibility of certain situations, the film would still be good for its genre, that of the action film with a sentimental background. Muccino knows how to direct and also experiments – for this film, he used, among others, a camera prototype that immerses itself in the cockpit of a moving car and shoots the actors in 360 degrees. “It’s a film we shot with shivers on our backs”, highlights the director, “a film that doesn’t simulates adrenaline, but lives it”. And this undoubtedly can be seen on screen.

Here Now is produced by Lotus Production with Rai Cinema, in association with Adler and with Ela Film; it will be released in Italian theatres on 31 October with 01 Distribution. Foreign sales are handled by American outfit Voltage Pictures.

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(Translated from Italian)

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