Roger Ebert was right when he wrote that Billy Wilder's Avanti! was about half-an-hour too long. But despite this, the film is a charming late career effort by one of the great creative geniuses of the Hollywood studio system. Warm as a summer breeze from a sunny Italian afternoon, Avanti! tells the story of American industrialist Wendell Armbruster as he travels to Italy to retrieve the body of his recently deceased father. When he arrives, he is horrified to learn that he had died in a car accident along with a female passenger who is revealed to have been his mistress for almost ten years. As Wendell wrestles the jungles of red tape that stand in the way of bringing his father's body back to the States, he starts up a romance with Pamela Piggott, the daughter of his father's mistress. Pamela delivers one of the film's best lines: "Italy is not a country - it's an emotion." And indeed, Avanti! is best related not by its plot but by its emotions: the palpable sorrow when Wendell and Pamela identify their parents' bodies, the mellifluous calm when they sunbathe in the nude, the good-natured insouciance that accompanies Wendell's transformation from up-tight businessman to unapologetic romantic, and the bittersweet melancholy that arises when they have to leave each other. So yes, Avanti! may have been a bit too long. But it was too long in the same way that a lazy afternoon reverberates with heat and pleasant stillness as it beckons for the weary to nap and dream.
7/10
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