Mine Vaganti

Mine Vaganti (Loose Cannons) by Ferzan Ozpetek


9 April 2011, Saturday night, 5th day of Made in Europe film festival, one more good choice. Mine Vaganti is such a delicious movie. It is one of those films that can make you happy despite the drama, somehow like Almodóvar movies.
It was a full house at Lumiere and the audience enjoyed themselves but these actors and the director diserve at first to get compliments for their part in this film. All the characters are well developed and the various layers of the film bring the total to a splendid end of the movie.



Award-winning director Ferzan Özpetek's 'Mine Vaganti' lifts the lid on a multi-generational household coming to terms with a rapidly modernising world.


Tommaso is the youngest son of the well-to-do Cantone family, who own a pasta factory in Puglia. His mother Stefania is loving but stifled by bourgeois convention; his father Vincenzo has unrealistically high expectations of his children; his aunt Luciana is an eccentric; his sister Elena a frustrated housewife; his brother Antonio works with their father at the pasta factory; and then there is his rebellious grandmother, trapped in the memory of an impossible love. All of them loose cannons in their own way...

Tommaso returns home from Rome to attend an important family dinner at which his father intends to hand over management of the family business to him and his brother, and their new associate Brunetti. Determined to assert his own personal choices, Tommaso plans to announce at the dinner that he is gay. But that evening, just as he begins to say "silence please", he is upstaged by his brother who, to everyone's surprise, reveals his own secret! Antonio is promptly disowned and father Vincenzo collapses from a heart attack.
With the family in a state of turmoil, Tommaso reluctantly steps in to run the factory with the new business partner's daughter, Alba. Despite his growing affection for the gorgeous but complex Alba, Tommaso's heart isn't in it and he misses his life in Rome. But how can he come out now and risk damaging his father's health further? A surprise visit from his friends forces some well hidden family secrets to the surface and some realisations along the way.

Mine Vaganti is an uproarious, uplifting and moving comedy.