Winner of an Italian Academy Award for Best Director, Pupi Avati's latest film is a dazzling comedy with a poignant streak set in the Rome and Bologna of the 1920s. Nello Balocchi (Neri Marcoré), 35, is a shy and clumsy man devoted to the academic world. His lack of interest in women has become an increasing source of anxiety to his womanizing father (Giancarlo Giannini), a tailor for the Pope. He sends Nello to teach in a high school in Bologna with the hopes that he will find a wife. After a series of mishaps, he finds himself at a dance in a home for blind women, where he meets Angela, a beautiful society girl who went blind in an accident. She turns his life upside down and teaches him that there is a lot more to love than meets the eye. Directed by Pupi Avati. Cast: Neri Marcoré, Vanessa Incontrada, Sandra Milo, Giulio Bosetti, Nino D'Angelo, Giancarlo Giannini. Color, 103 Minutes, Italian with English Subtitles, Drama, Not Rated

Customer Rating:
Summary: A well-directed, beautifully shot really bad soap opera (spoliers inside)
Comment: I am Italian, and I loved the way Bologna is shot in this movie (Bologna is a beautiful city between Florence and Venice which deserves more attention from tourists than it currently has). It is clear that there was a good director behind this movie. However, the story is very very soap opera-like and the main characters' acting is stunningly inept.

The "love" story is really a one-sided thing between Nello, one of the dumbest characters you will ever see on screen and Angela, a beautiful but shallow and ruthlessly manipulative woman. Even in a movie world where love is blind (pun not intended) the dumbness of Nello is astounding. The fact that his love is purely due to Angela's appearance makes his character even less likable. He just deserves what he gets, and he's even happy at the end.

But the unlikeable two main characters and the annoying "love story" are not the worst thing of this movie. There are, after all, several exceptional movies centered around unlikable characters. The acting is what's really terrible here. Minor characters are, in most cases, played very well but serious actors (Angela and Nello's fathers, the director of the school where Nello teaches). But Nello and Angela are impersonated by stunningly bad actors. Incontrada, not being Italian, has been dubbed, and unfortunately the woman who gives Angela her voice is as bad as she could be. She delivers every sentence as if she were in a soap commercial.

I love well-made Italian movies based on small, personal stories, and I loved the images of Italy in this one, but I really cannot recommend "Incantato" at all, and indeed I am somewhat surprised by the positive reviews I found here.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Romantic Love in Incantato
Comment: Incantato is a marvelousl movie about how love can transform us and make us a better person. It is the story of Nello, a thirty five year old professor of Latin and Greek. A lonely bachelor, his father and mother push him to leave his native Rome and to go to Bologna with the hope of finding a soul mate. With a series of comic miscalculations and flip flops, Nello finally encounters his dream woman in a clinic for the blind. Angela, a beautiful woman from the upper class is the incarnation of all of Nello's dreams. However, her father and others warn Nello that Angela is not suited for him but he persists. Another touching subplot is how the quiet, unassuming Nello captivates his students in his Latin class with his daring interpretations of love poems and his defiance of the State's boring curriculum. Beautifully photographed, with a lush romantic soundtrack, Incantato is surely a wonderful movie about love, passion and heartbreak.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Incantato
Comment: It,s a good movie, excellent play and interesting the subject. My only problem was that it is so sad, almost like the Postino. But that does not decrease the artistic value

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Sometimes, love is an elusive personage!
Comment: This is essentially, a lesson of life instead a love story. The main feature is a very talented profesor who dominates in notable extent Latin language as well as classics such as Virgilio and lucrecio among others. He is a very shy man who having reached his 35 still have not gotten a couple worthy of his affection, until that day comes, when a blind woman will engage and inspire in him the best of his feelings. There is a notable appearing of Giannini as his father, sailor of several Popes, who makes a terrfic performance spicing the movie of deserved status.

But additionally the impressive beauty of+this new Goddess of the Italian cinema Vanessa Incontrada, is a very important factor to take it into account.

The secondary roles work out at perfection, Avati immerses the spectator and handles the camera as a silent witness to make us to know those intimate and unsaid details behind stages.

This a priceless author piece that must be seen, and I am very glad because after a decade of modest proposals, Italy seems to reencounter with itself as a real market of artistic possibilities and new stories to tell and enjoy.

After you leave the cinema hall, you will remind that smart reflection of Balzac: "The love: the eternal toy that women pretend to give and men to deserve."

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An old fashioned love story
Comment: There are so many reasons why this is a great film. The hero of the story is a 35 year old man who is attracted to women but
extremely shy of them. His father, the tailor to the Catholic Pope, is very sexual so he cannot understand what the problem is with his son. Nevertheless, he directs him to go to Bologna in the 1920's where the man teaches Greek and Latin to students preparing for university. At a chance encounter, he discovers a beautiful woman without sight who enchants him. He falls in love at first glance.

My favorite part of the movie is the love scene. I have NEVER seen one done properly with an extremely shy man experiencing his first sexual encounter. Too often a film will treat the encounter comically not romantically. The scene is touching, sensitive, and erotic. This European director gets it right.

Finally, the cinematography is gorgeous, particularly the scenes of glittering palaces and restaurants in Italy. In my book the movie is a winner.

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