Gabriele Muccino’s “Baciami Ancora” [“Kiss Me Again”], the long-anticipated sequel to his hugely popular 2001 film “L’Ultimo Bacio” [“The Last Kiss”] has not generated the enthusiastic reviews that the Roman director would have wished for.
The film, starring Stefano Accorsi and Vittoria Puccini, features the same group of friends that we saw in their thirties in “L’Ultimo Bacio” but ten years later life’s responsibilities have caught up with them and they are not finding it easy. The main character, Carlo, who seems destined never to be content with his lot, again plays at being Casanova but he is too attached to his daughter not to try to win back his former partner, Giulia.
We watch Carlo and his friends as they wrestle with marital crisis, the power of the past, depression, unrequited love and serious health worries – all problems that many of us can identify with and the emotional impact of such trauma is well conveyed by the cast.
The problem, according to several critics, is that every scene is presented as a key scene and at the end, the spectator does not quite know which ones he ought or wants to remember. The storyline, therefore, becomes unclear and rather difficult to follow . Muccino, says one critic, made more controlled films when he was working with Will Smith in the US.
Audience reaction has been mixed but many fans of L’Ultimo Bacio say that the sequel is not the carefree film they had expected, partly because of its popular trailer which put the theme song in the Italian cd singles charts. Even this has been blasted by the critics, who say that the soundtrack is too invasive.
We at Italy Magazine are, of course, hopeless romantics, so we suggest you watch the trailer and enjoy:
