Noi Tre

It's idyllic summer-interlude time for the 14-year-old Mozart. To prepare for examinations for Bologna's Accademia Filarmonica, spunky young Amadé comes with his father to the country villa of Count Pallavicini. It is not a welcoming household: the Count is a curmudgeon with a distant young wife, a diffident son Giuseppe (who pisses on their bed) and a mad cousin. Avati's interest is in showing Mozart as a common-or-garden spotted youth, sneaking in a quick adolescence (fights with local roughnecks, romance with a neighbour's daughter, bonding with Giuseppe) between music lessons, exam pressure, overbearing parental encouragement, and the damnable, insistent call of genius. It's not an engaging tale, shot with the restraint of Straub but with hardly a note of music to relieve the deathly monotony. Framed as a poetic imagining, in the present, of two old men taking a walk in the woods, the film is entirely true to their dull inspiration.