Author's rating:
Three families on vacation forced to live together in the same house due to an error by the booking agency. This is the summary of the story I hate summer, directed by Massimo Venier and with the comic trio of Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo always in great shape. The screenplay is light and perhaps out of phase with the weather season but, in a moment of almost flat calm in the cinematic offer, it is able to hold up an entertaining story. The direction is honest, it doesn't offer anything new and doesn't allow space for the imagination especially when it has to do with these experienced characters.
The story takes place in the middle of summer when the three families are preparing to spend their holidays by the sea where they booked a house. Upon their arrival, they find the house occupied by other "tenants" who also have the right to live in the same house. Having no alternatives, they agree to share the same roof and get over it to save the holiday. Thus begins a troubled experience between very different characters, stories and life habits which, however, in the end, thanks to the help of their teenage children in full love affairs, will find the necessary and sufficient balance. Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo are guarantee of a “quiet” comedy, never vulgar or ungrammatical and always within the careful reading of national vices and virtues.
With this film they seem to have come to a crossroads of maturity after a long break from movie screens. In fact, in this work, they maintain the same figure as the other titles that made them famous (remember the trilogy also signed by Massimo Venier: Three men and a leg, Life is like this and Ask me if I'm happy) but there is a less breathless sense of having to entertain at all costs and a subtle melancholy vein also shines through very clearly (which will be fully evident at the end of the story) which was almost completely absent in the previous works. The country that is painted under the surface is weak and with some crises always at hand but, in the end, good and tolerant as instead, often and unfortunately, it doesn't happen in reality.
A limit of I hate summer it appears immediately and, in some moments, it is even annoying: many similarities with Paolo Virzì's Ferie d'agosto dated 1996 which was attended by respectable actors and actresses. In that case, the social and cultural picture was much more composite and articulated and, even in that story, moments of strong individual and collective tension were not absent. The big difference is in the ending, in that pinch of bitterness that remains when you get to the end credits: while in Venier's film the good feelings strongly emerge, in Virzì's the opposite ones are overbearing where almost all the protagonists return to home from vacation worse than when they had arrived. Between the two films there are 24 years of difference and you can see them all.
