Using clichés as crutches, writer-director Massimiliano Bruno has taken a very safe route with his latest film, Escort in Love (Nessuno mi può giudicare) (2011). No shipping into unchartered waters for Bruno who, with co-writer Edoardo Falcone, contrives a scenario in which as 33 year old woman used to opulence and bossing her caricaturised migrant servants around, suddenly has to earn money of her own to pay off her recently deceased husband’s debts.
Alice (Paola Cortellesi) is in a horrible bind: her luxurious lifestyle is suddenly under threat. Forced out of her home and into a ‘roof pad’ that you wouldn’t offer to your worst enemy, she faces the prospect of legal action if she fails to find the finances.
But just as her bemoaning reaches a fever pitch, Alice recalls the story of a recent party guest, Eva (Anna Foglietta), who’s been raking in the big bucks as an escort to unattractive or geriatric men with deep pockets and a fetish for female companions they can procure with financial enticements.
Of course there’s a bittersweet twist to Alice’s tale. Despite the unsavoury requirements she’s forced to endure, something far more attractive, in an altruistic man with a heart of gold waits in the wings, though of course he has no clue as to how she’s now accruing her earnings. And naturally Giulio (Raoul Bova) draws Alice’s ire initially, for as the internationally accredited Romantic Comedy Decree continually reminds us, those perfectly suited for one another must first begin their relationship despising one another. But we’ve been led by the nose ten or twenty thousand times too many to fall for this lame diversionary tactic. Alice and Giulio’s union is written in the stars.
And yet despite this predictable routine spilling over into cliché at the expected moments, Escort in Love (literally translated as Nobody Can Judge Me) is not a total train wreck. Some of the jokes and one liners, thanks mostly to a semi-rich vein of admittedly absurb provincial humour, manage to raise a smile if not an audible guffaw.
To damn it with faint praise I’ll say that the film is indeed highly ‘watchable’; that’s to say, cheesy but amiable entertainment, made with an eye to very commercial gains in the short term rather than an appeal for long-term appreciation. For a non brain-expanding night out Escort in Love just may fit the bill.
I say:
A not intolerable, throwaway comedy that strikes an enjoyably commercial chord even if its final declarative statement and inevitable sentimental moments are enough to churn the stomach.
See it for:
For the colourful secondary characters who add some necessary spice to what is an otherwise predictable concoction.
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