A Summer in Genoa

Product Description

Two-time O® nominee Colin Firth turns in a riveting performance as a widower desperately trying to hold his family together after tragedy threatens to tear them apart. Searching for a fresh start, Joe (Firth) moves with his two daughters from Chicago to the Italian town of Genoa. Seduced by the ancient city, each find themselves lost in an alluring paradise where souls stir and spirits linger.

Bonus Features:
Cast/Crew Interviews, Behind-the-Scenes Footage.

.com

An American family moves to Italy to start over in Michael Winterbottom's A Summer in Genoa. The film has hardly be when Marianne (Hope Davis) dies in a car c, leaving behind her academic husband, Joe (Colin Firth, very good), and their daughters, Kelly (The O.C.'s Willa Holland) and Mary (Dark Water's Perla Haney-Jardine). Five months later, British-born Joe exchanges modern Chicago for medieval Genoa, where Harvard classmate Barbara (Catherine Keener) shows the trio around the city. While Joe teaches, the girls take piano lessons, but other things remain much the same. Mary, who feels responsible for the accident, continues to receive visitations from her mother's ghost, and Kelly sneaks out to canoodle with a Vespa-riding Lothario. As the weeks pass, the sisters grow further apart, not least because Kelly also blames her younger sister. Winterbottom contrasts Kelly's romance with a possible relationship between Joe and Barbara, except he expresses greater interest in an attractive student with a more direct approach. Not counting the opening and closing scenes, however, both of which involve automobiles, the director concentrates on the rhythms of life for three people grieving in their own way, rather than using a series of incidents to build to a cathartic conclusion, making Summer one of his more subtle, if less eventful efforts. The extra feature offers behind-the-scenes footage and a 21-minute featurette, in which the filmmaker says he took inspiration from Nicolas Roeg's chilling Don't Look Now, in which a couple moves to Venice to mourn a loss. --Kathleen C. Fennessy