Ages of Love

Ages of Love

Cast: Robert De Niro, Monica Bellucci, Laura Chitatti, Donatella Finocchiaro, Michele Placido, Emanule Propizio, Riccardo Scamarcio, Valeria Solarino, Carlo Verdone
Director: Giovanni Veronesi
Genre: Romance
Rated: MA
Running Time: 124 minutes

Synopsis: Featuring an all-star cast including Robert De Niro (in his first Italian-language speaking roll since Bertolucci's 1900), the sexy new romantic comedy from writer/director Giovanni Veronesi is told in three interconnected chapters that illustrate the three 'ages of man'.

Release Date: November 24th, 2011


Director's Notes
Love is a topic you could write millions of stories about. The three chapters comprising this film (actually, I like to speak about three stories, each one articulated like a small film within the film) connect to one another and could well represent the sentimental life of one single protagonist told at every different age. Love and feelings as they are experienced or as they will be experienced. "Youth" is the story I prefer because I can see myself in it. It is filmed in places where I grew up and tells about events that have characterised my own life. It goes like this basically: just when you feel you've come out of it and think you can start living like an adult, something always happens that stops you and takes you back in time, as if a piece of your youth was still "stuck" on you and you have to live it out. This is what happens to the protagonist and I think it has happened to many of us. The second story is closely connected to us because our society is chock full of mythomaniacs. Even our next door neighbor may be one, for example. Stalking has become a familiar practice. In this episode, the protagonist loses everything because of an "oversight", let's call it, that makes him fall victim to a mythomaniac and, consequently, leads him to hit rock bottom. I like to point out that the character played by Carlo Verdone - Fabio Renzullo - is the prime example of that repentant coward that has always characterised the "commedia all'italiana". The third story speaks about the older generation, people who at seventy can still hope to make a new life for themselves. Just think that, at the end of the 1970s, a sixty year-old person was considered old. This episode, superbly interpreted by an unusually sweet and tender Bob De Niro, is the mirror of our times, where a man no longer considered old but rather just "beyond" - this is how we like to define him - starts to live again in every way thanks to the transplant of a new heart, an organ symbolically connected to affection between human beings. And so a new life begins for him that will once again bring him love. Of course, the time will also come when love will cease to "be" because the heart will stop beating... but this is a problem for those who are left behind.
Giovanni Veronesi