Venial Sin

The sin is venial but the film is barely excusable: yet another saga of a boy's sentimental education, softcore in format and with a nasty puritanism beneath a wafer-thin fashionable permissiveness (we are supposed to laugh when father thanks the Lord that his boy is not gay after all). Basically, on a family vacation by the seaside, kid brother (Momo) works out his adolescent pangs through a crush, eventually consummated, on his big sister-in-law (Antonelli). The generally lame and/or slushy performances are not even relieved by the bursts of humour, which are on a par with tenth rate graffiti; the camerawork is ploddingly intimate, with - of course - the climactic misty lens; and the score is spectacularly awful pasta muzak.