The Manual of Love (2005)

Instant Favorite.

Fantastic!

An absolute waste of money

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

A delightful movie about the many aspects of love. The director knows comedy, doesn't talk down to his audience, and together with the screenwriter, delivers some insightful and hilarious moments. I found the movie dragged, or rather annoyed, only during one short stretch. But that was more than offset by the incredibly funny and talented Carlo Vendone as the physician in the final segment. I, and the entire full house of the audience at the St. Louis International Film Festival, was with this film every entertaining step of the way. The entire cast delivers believable performances, in a film that moves at a happy, involving pace. Laughter is contagious... see it with a group.

It's a very well-made light-hearted, romantic comedy consisting of several small stories sorted out by the different stages of relationships. The stories were told in such a fluid way that you don't feel disturbed by the director's chronically linear view on relationships, although the figures in different stories were connected in a way or another.The outstanding performances from every actor in this film also makes the everyday love stories naturally telling. Although the audience can share lots of jokes about relationships in this film, I also like that sometimes the actors talked to the audience directly through the camera. This is a skillful technique to get the audience's empathy and involvement.Brava & carina - this film is surely very entertaining.

The story is most banal and told us in stereotypical ways: falling in love, marriage, crises, betrayal. Giovanni Veronesi doesn't reach the goal of finding an interesting and original way of showing us something we've seen so much already in the history of the movies. The scene-structure is not clear for most part of the movie, and the feeling is that the actors are left mostly to their instincts, not doing a particular good and appealing job with them, therefore left undirected, and therefore badly directed, all of this on the basis of a very weak screenplay. We don't get hooked, we don't laugh, we just yawn and wait for it to be over so we can forget about this so called work of art (a very bad one!)

This is a fine Italian comedy that I would recommend to anyone. The movie is about the several steps of love relationships: falling in love, crisis, infidelity, parting. Each of these four steps is represented by a couple: Muccino-Trinca fall in love, Rubino-Buy are on the verge of disaster, Abbrescia is unfaithful to Littizzetto (and vice versa), while Verdone is mad about losing his woman (but will finally fall in love with another one, thus closing the circle).The feature is structured in almost separate episodes, which is a reference to many "commedie all'italiana" of the '60s. Nevertheless the stories are ingenuously linked among each other and the writing is so skillful that the movie never loses its pace. Plus, it is very well acted. Verdone and Buy are almost perfect, and so is Littizzetto. (This actress became famous thanks to TV shows, but is actually very good and definitely deserves to play a dramatic role to show how credible she is and how versatile).Verdone proves brave by accepting a character both ridiculous and tragic. He is a physician who has been abandoned by his wife and tries to re-build his life out of its pieces. Maybe the script is a bit excessive here, as it is not clear whether we have to laugh at or identify with him. Anyway he redeems himself in a beautiful ending almost reminding of "La dolce vita"'s.The episode that I liked the least is the first. It avoids most of the stupid clichés of Italian comedies for teenagers, but why then all those swearwords? They are just annoying and don't add anything to the story and the characters. Plus, the episode is kind of unrealistic.Obviously, this is not a revolutionary movie, but it is very funny and, most of all, not spoiled by silly character parts as so many Italian movies are.