The Best of Youth (2003)

A six-hour Italian family saga spanning 1966 to 2003, The Best of Youth follows the Carati brothers through the Arno flood, the Years of Lead, the Red Brigades, and the Tangentopoli scandals, and it manages all of it without a single moment of instruction. The film belongs to the old tradition of Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard, where history is a weather system passing over a family. It predates the current cultural moment by two decades, and its instincts are those of a novelist, not a pamphleteer. We are shown corruption, terrorism, and grief. We are never told what to think about them.

The one thread that comes closest to a modern preoccupation is the psychiatry of Nicola, who spends his career fighting the institutional abuse of the mentally ill. Giorgia, tied to a bed in a hospital that has given up on her, is the film's conscience. This is Basaglia-era reform, though, a historical argument about humane treatment, not a contemporary vocabulary of neurodivergence. Women in the film, Giulia, Mirella, Sara, are given full and consequential lives, and the film never builds a thesis around them. The politics function as texture: the Red Brigades, the anti-Mafia judges, the bribery, all rendered as the air the characters breathe.

This leaves an old-fashioned humanist chronicle, and the modern scoring apparatus finds little to grip. There is no diversity-conscious casting in a period-accurate Rome. There is no environmental parable in the flood, no body-positivity messaging, no racial reckoning, no lecture. The film trusts its audience to keep up for six hours, which is its own kind of confidence. As a vintage, this is a dry, structured, old-world red, best decanted slowly. It will not satisfy anyone looking for the current fashion. It was never trying to.