While Casey Affleck rakes up points as one of Hollywood's upcoming stars and the Ben Whishaw-James McAvoy rivalry heats up the UK cinemas, there is a rising young actor from Italy who is emerging into the limelight and making a name for himself as a talent to watch.

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Says european-films.net:

Recently returned from the Cannes Film Festival, where he wowed Un Certain Regard audiences as the protagonist of Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother is an Only Child), Italian actor Elio Germano is lining up several new projects for him to star or co-star in.

Germano already won the Best Actor award at the David di Donatello Awards in Italy and getting more media mileage as we speak. Definitely a candidate for the next European shooting stars list, Germano is absolutely brilliant in this movie about two brothers.

My Brother is an Only Child - more about the film:

Two teenagers roll about boisterously on the ground in a ball, a struggle in the form of an embrace similar to that of young wild cats. We are in Latina, about 50 kilometres south of Rome. The time is the 1960s, at the heart of an Italy of lower classes and at the approach of a period of ideological turbulence, which would leave the south awash in fire and blood a decade later.

It is this era of confusion and rifts which Daniele Luchetti (discovered at Cannes 1991 with The Yes Man) takes a sideways glance at through the story of two brothers: Accio or "Nasty" (Elio Germano), who discovers the political works of the neo-fascists, and his older brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio), who becomes a member of the radical extreme left. These antagonistic stances, which fail to break the fraternal link, offer the director a seductive novelistic unifying theme that focuses on the individual aspects of a historically turbulent period.

Freely adapted from the novel Il Fasciocomunista and written by the director with Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli (see interview), a duo who have a string of successes to their name (The Best of Youth, Once You Are Born..., Romanzo criminale), the story of My Brother Is An Only Child clearly sides with Accio.

Starring a remarkable Elio Germano, who won a David 2007 for Best Actor and who was discovered at Cannes this year where the film was screened in the Un Certain Regard, this idealist agitated character symbolises all the distractions of youth in search of its identity.

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Sent home from the seminary by his despairing parents who don’t know what to do with the rebellious hellion, brute and braggart Accio comes of age (by way of a superb temporal ellipsis) by enrolling himself in the local extreme rightwing movement. But with burned out cars with rotten eggs thrown on them, his political education gives him little satisfaction, aside from provoking his own family where his brother Manrico, leader of the striking workers at the factory and a hedonistic seducer, attracts all the attention.

Deep down, the most anarchistic of the two brothers is not the one we think it is. And when the time comes to choose between life and ideology, family and doctrine, Accio no longer obeys his first commitments, going through failure to rallying his former enemies, then abandoning the group by remaining faithful to his native town, while Manrico plunges into a life of secrecy and violence in the north of the country.

A cocktail of sentimental intrigue (with Diane Fleri as the two brothers’ muse), a family tale and a historical synopsis, Luchetti succeeds in skilfully blending drama and lightness. The director does not shy away from using comedy in a world full of tragedy, thereby giving My Brother Is an Only Child an irresistible charm without relinquishing the perilous drifts and ridiculous misguidance of ideological fervour, whether it is black or red.

[ Official Movie site ] [ CineEuropa film focus ] [ Elio Germano personal site ]

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