ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

THE SUCCESS of a film often has little to do with the size of its budget. Hollywood can spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars on a Summer blockbuster that feels as soulless as a computer game. Mid-August Lunch is a modest, minimalist tale, but it has the kind of charm that money cannot buy.

Writer/director/star Gianni Di Gregorio is best known as one of the screenwriters of the Italian Mafia hit Gomorrah. Mid-August Lunch was inspired by his own experiences tending to his widowed mother during her final years.

It is set in Rome during one of the hottest periods of the year. The middle-aged Gianni lives with his mother in an old apartment in the Trastevere area of the city. Perennially short of cash, he reluctantly agrees to look after the building supervisor’s mother in return for a few unpaid bills disappearing.

The supervisor arrives with his mother and her sister. When Gianni’s family doctor asks a similar favour he is left to care for four old ladies during a long August holiday weekend.

Mid-August Lunch is a little slice of life told with the intimacy of a home movie. The old ladies are all played by non-professional performers who invest their characters with a twinkling sense of mischief, suggesting that physical decline has done little to dampen their spirits or diminish their appetite for life.

We soon discover their little eccentricities, a common sense of loneliness and how they all begin to flourish with a bit of company. A bittersweet reflection on growing older, the film is beautifully observed and never overstays its welcome.