Dir: Gianni Zanasi Italy 2007. 108 mins.
The real surprise of the 2007 Venice Days sidebar on the Lido , Don't Think About It is that rarest of things: an exportable Italian comedy that features neither Roberto Benigni nor Nanni Moretti. Directed with an admirable lightness of touch by Gianni Zanasi (who was in the main Venice competition in 1999 with the lesser A Domani), this is a bittersweet tale of provincial life that conceals deeper currents beneath its surface charm. It also demonstrates once and for all that Valerio Mastandrea - too often miscast in solemn arthouse roles - is one of Italy 's great deapan comic actors.

Picked up by Pyramide just before Venice, the film has already sold, unusually, to a handful of territories (Australia, Benelux, Switzerland and Greece) before even securing a distributor at home in Italy. When it does, its high feelgood quotient should ensure a modest but persistent box-office run. Elsewhere, the breezy indie-rock and classical soundtrack and the universality of the small-town setting should overcome the few Italian in-jokes to ensure a good response.

The film's passive, slack-faced hero, Stefano Nardini (Mastandrea), is an ageing guitarist in a smalltime Roman punk band. He's so slow to anger - indeed to any emotion at all - that when he catches his girlfriend in flagrante with a much younger guitarist from a rival band, all he can think of to say to the usurper is 'I liked your last record'. But the notion that he is in a rut somehow sinks in, and Stefano heads back to the small town that he left for rock stardom all those years before to take stock and get his head together.

Stefano's bulky elder brother Alberto (Giuseppe Battiston) has taken over the running of the family business - a factory that produces marinated cherries - from his golf-obsessed father, and his sister Michela (Anita Caprioli) is doing what she always wanted to do - looking after the dolphins in the local aqua park.

But Stefano soon realises that beneath the tranquil surface of provincial life, not everything is as it seems. This is the film's comic motor: our gradual realisation that the supposed rock n' roll rebel is actually a rather dull, regular guy, while the family and friends he left behind to fester in this nowhere town are all, in their own small ways, barking mad.

There's nothing formulaic, though, about the way that Zanasi and co-scripter Michele Pellegrini develop the premise. They're especially adept at chicaning us from guffaws to seriousness in the space of a couple of cuts, and romantic subplots - Alberto's affair with a call girl who is touched by his bumbling honesty, Michela's rekindled affair with an old flame who has become a slick MP, but turns out to be less of a simpleton than he first seemed - are nicely interwoven and developed without recourse to cliche. There's a lull around the midpoint, but Don't Think About It soon picks up and builds steadily to a well-judged, low-key finale.

Even the music surprises, avoiding High Fidelity indie stereotypes in favour of an off-the-wall mix of Italian classical music - which comes across, paradoxically, as Stefano's inner soundtrack - and post-punk from contemporary Italian bands Merci Miss Monroe and Les Fauves.

Director
Gianni Zanasi

Production companies
Pupkin Production (It)
ITC Movie (It)

Co-production
La7 (It)

International sales
Pyramide International (Fr)
(33) 1 42960220

Producers
Rita Rognoni
Beppe Caschetto

Screenplay
Gianni Zanasi
Michele Pellegrini

Cinematography
Giulio Pietromarchi

Production design
Roberto De Angelis

Editor
Rita Rognoni

Main cast
Valerio Mastandrea
Anita Caprioli
Giuseppe Battiston
Teco Celio
Gisella Burinato
Caterina Murino

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