The Wedding Director

How uneven is Bellocchio’s career! Decades after the glories of ‘Fists in the Pocket’, following hard on the heels of duds like ‘The Prince of Homburg’ and ‘The Nanny’, he bounded unexpectedly back with the weird and wonderful ‘My Mother’s Smile’. Four years on, that film has spawned a sequel of sorts, with Castellitto back, this time as a famous movie director reluctantly attending and filming his daughter’s wedding to a Catholic; thereafter things get complicated, surreal and, it must be said, somewhat silly, inconsequential and incoherent. The anti-clerical tone’s still there, but the humour’s less hit than miss, and a little of Castellitto’s melancholia goes a very long way. Disappointing.