Coming
back from “Human Capital,” the official Italian entry for the Oscars (and the first
one to make me shed real tears in a long time), I looked up a
couple of reviews. My verdict? The NYT piece takes
to a promising start, but then falls on its face by concluding: “the movie has
a third chapter that follows Serena into some messy, rather tedious
melodramatic complications and something of a coda that only restates the
obvious. It’s all handsomely managed, polished and professional, but the pieces
are too neatly manufactured to feel as if anything is truly at stake.” The
pitch for the Variety review is similarly clueless: “This
slick, stylish fusion of class critique and murder mystery confirms Paolo Virzi
as one of Italy's more dynamic directors.” But the title in The Guardian, which still positions itself as socially conscious, is particularly
damning – for the critic (“the UK leading
film critic,” if the BBC is still to be trusted) rather than for the movie he casually dismisses: “Stylish Yet Shallow Oscar Nominee.” There is much research indicating that our
perceptions and ideas reflect to a greater extent how we function mentally and
neurosomatically – as opposed to the qualities of external objects and
phenomena (an issue I addressed in a recent article, "Out of Touch"; case in point: “the dress”). Which makes me feel for all those
movie critics (and others) whom the movie left deeply unmoved. This, of course,
in itself must be a sign of the times “Human Capital” sets out to deconstruct –
and perhaps the main reason why it has become so hard to imagine a more
humane alternative.
