devikamenon Lately I've come to appreciate small, intimate movies that are in the 'slice of life' style. This Italian gem I recently sampled is a worthy example. The eponymous Gianni is a retiree in Rome, somewhere on the long end of middle-age. His wife still works, thus he is sent off on various domestic errands during working hours, and this he is content to do. Then there's his somewhat confused daughter and her equally shiftless boyfriend who has moved into their home. There's Gianni's rich, demanding mother who has him at her beck and call. And then there's his friend and peer Alfonso, a rakish lawyer who attempts to get Gianni off the straight and narrow and into the fast lane of late-age sexual/romantic dalliance.Now this straight and narrow as it were, is very much Gianni's choice. It's just that he has reached a point where he is seemingly invisible to the young women around him. Invisible and inaudible. He is touchingly earnest in his realization, accepting it with a kind of shrugging melancholy. But he has the persistent Alfonso who keeps nudging him away from this acceptance; even if we don't know if Alfonso is actually successful with the young women himself. And there are a few very beautiful women around poor Gianni. First, the downstairs neighbor, a hazel-eyed sprite who flirts with him relentlessly, turns out to have passed off her dog-walking duties on him. Then the identical blond twins, Alfonso's clients; Gianni's mother's caretaker; another woman who is an old flame, and yet another who is an old acquaintance: they make up the rolls as he shambles around amiably trying to see where he can get.Read full review at http://devikamenon.blogspot.com/2016/06/foreign- movie-Friday-gianni-e-le-donne.html

shozzas15 Being someone of a similar age, & in a vaguely similar situation, I felt very sympathetic to the central character. But it just wasn't enough. I love gentle, wry comedy, 50s films such as The Ladykillers being among my favourites, but there was always something else, something more darkly comic & sardonic going on beneath the surface of such films.This was a pleasant film, but slight in the extreme; full of commonplaces, all performed with a sigh & a shrug of the shoulders, his friend was a stereotype, so were the girls, he seemed to have no real interest in anything. The only thing which made me laugh was the wheel spinning nuns. And I really couldn't see the significance of the ending.There are worse ways to kill a couple of hours, but life, as the lead character evidently knows, is far too short for that!

georgep53 "The Salt Of Life" is a delightful, absurdist, male menopause comedy. Gianni (Gianni Di Gregorio) is a 60 year old retiree with a libido that has gone into hyperdrive. He gets no gratification from his condescending wife who berates him for wasting his pension on frivolous expenditures. He also shares living space with an apathetic college age daughter and her no-account boyfriend who lolls away the day eating and reading the paper. His mother Valeria (Valeria De Franciscis) lives in a small villa where she treats Gianni like a servant summoning him when the TV goes on the fritz. His daily recreation consists of walking the dog and ogling the opposite sex. The elderly men he observes roosting on the sidewalk are a foreshadowing of a future he dreads and makes him all the more determined to rekindle his sex life. Actor, director and co-screenwriter Gianni Di Gregorio gives a totally authentic and wonderfully funny performance. "The Salt Of Life" is a nice piece of escapist entertainment. A hilarious 90 minute diversion. I hated to see it end.

claudio canaletto After Mid August Lunch, another little great movie by Di Gregorio. In this second film, the mise-en-scene has become more mature, as also the structure of the script. The realism of the acting and dialogs are the same of Mid August Lunch, giving freshness and comic reliefs to the story. The plot is about a 60 years old man who suddenly understands he's become "transparent" for women, simply they don't look at him in "that certain way" anymore. But this is the surface of the movie, the funny "hook" of the storyline. What really matters to Di Gregorio is something else, something deeper, related to the loneliness of a man facing old age. So sometimes the film takes a different way, turning from the comedy for a moment, with beautiful flashes of melancholy and bittersweet fatalism which reach levels of great cinema. The Salt of Life suggest the birth of a new author.