Primo Amore

A strange – and increasingly menacing – impro-feel anatomy of a relationship. When bald-headed, 40 year-old, Verona gold-dealer Vittorio (Trevisan) first meets, through an internet  dating agency, 25 year-old ‘free-trade’ shopworker and art model Sonia and remarks that she looks heavier than she has given him to believe, it seems like a case of a lack of social manners. But as their relationship grows and his obssessive insistence that she should lose 10 kilos continues, his obliviousness to her evident discomfort plants questions in the viewer’s mind – if not poor Sonia’s. Garrone applies a cool, non-didactic approach, a justicious amount of loose, hand-held camera shots and  an accumulation of significant detail to mount an effective case history of emotional dysfunction and inherent sexual-political power struggle. Over-determined, but effectively unsettling.