I Hate Summer (2020)

Three Milanese fathers, each carrying a different variety of domestic grievance, arrive on a southern island to find they have rented the same house. The premise delivers a summer of forced proximity, a lost dog, a runaway boy, a Massimo Ranieri concert, and a great deal of shouting in the kitchen. Massimo Venier directs the trio Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo with the easy rhythm of a troupe that knows its audience, and the result became the third highest grossing Italian film of 2020. It is a warm, well-made comedy about men learning to say the things they have been avoiding.

For the purposes of cultural classification, the cupboard is bare. The cast is Italian and white, and the film shows no interest in commenting on that fact. The wives are wives, the mothers are mothers, and nobody stages an intervention about it. Ludovico, the twelve-year-old who retreats into video games, is treated as a boy with a pen pal and a mood, not as a case study. Giovanni's failing shoe-accessory shop is a device for marital concealment, not an indictment of late capitalism. When Aldo's terminal diagnosis arrives in the final act, it lands as sentiment earned through character, not as a sermon. The film wants us to cry a little and laugh more.

There is no lecture here, no lesson appended to the closing fireworks. The film's virtues are the old ones: patience, craft, a good ensemble, a well-timed silence. A sommelier presented with this bottle would note its clarity and its complete absence of additives, then be obliged to record a score of zero. The summer is agreeable. The audit is uneventful. We mark the file complete and move to the next screening.