Word: luca
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Zeffirelli gives a funny and poignant account of the influence of three women on Luca Innocenti, a boy whose mother has died and father has handed over to the care of an elderly British woman, Mary Wallace. Mary, played by Joan Plowright, forges a close bond with Luca. She teaches him how to be a perfect English gentleman and shares with him the loss of her father and fiance in World...
Judi Dench, who recently won an Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love, takes on a very different but equally convincing role here. She plays Arabella, a sentimental amateur artist who cries while reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Arabella introduces Luca to the beauty of Florentine sculpture and paves the way for his later interest...
...intrudes into this wartime idyll. Elsa is Jewish. She is the anonymous philanthropist who puts money in a trust for Luca, delivers passports with his help to a Jewish woman, and, after the war breaks out, pays to move her English acquaintances from a dingy barracks to a hotel. Lady Hester assumes that Mussolini, with whom she once had tea, is the one who is paying for their stay at the hotel...
...with Mussolini strikes a balance between the humor and emotional acuity in the setting of a coming-of-age movie, in this case the coming of age of Luca. The film engages the audience's sympathy without being mawkish. Unlike Zeffirelli's immensely popular 1961 production of Romeo and Juliet, Tea with Mussolini does not pander to a specific audience. It manages to convey the struggles and foibles of its characters with economy of sentiment and love...
...beef: despite the fact that he has spent more than $1 million of his own money on his new vision for the film, the studio won't let him complete it. Instead it's releasing a version that Norton helped edit. Over at New Line, president Mike De Luca says he gave Kaye three chances to finish the film, spent an extra $1.5 million and endured meetings to which Kaye brought a Tibetan lama, a rabbi and a monk. Kaye's latest salvo: he wants the credits to say the film was directed by Humpty Dumpty...