The New York Times 1.5.04
The New Italian Icon
By A.O. SCOTT
There was a time, not long ago, when Italian movies -- and Italian movie stars -- arrived on our shores with pleasing regularity. That country's great actresses, in particular -- Anna Magnani, Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale, Sophia Loren, to commence a list that easily could fill this page - became international icons of Mediterranean womanhood, vivid embodiments of earthy sensuality, maternal passion, histrionic suffering and volcanic capriciousness. But since the 1970's, Italian cinema has turned inward, toward quiet domestic drama and solemn political inquiry, and it has, with the exception of the occasional sentimental crowd-pleaser (''Il Postino,'' for instance), slipped out of fashion.
This is a shame, because the quality and breadth of Italian screen acting is as impressive as ever. Perhaps the most abundant support for this claim can be found in ''The Best of Youth'' a six-hour film by Marco Tulio Giondana, originally made for Italian television, which will be released theatrically by Miramax in July. The film, which follows a middle-class Roman family from the mid-1960's to the year 2000, features a cast of extraordinarily capable actors, none of them familiar faces. The most striking face, surely, belongs to Maya Sansa, a 28-year-old actress of Iranian and Italian descent who seems to carry in her dark eyes and soulful features a dramatic tradition that reaches back into antiquity and forward into the global cinematic future.
In ''The Best of Youth,'' her character, Mirella Utano, is a Sicilian photographer who arrives in the middle of the story, befriending one of the main characters, a handsome and volatile police officer. The sight of her sitting on a sun-flooded cafe terrace momentarily lifts his despair. Her subsequent appearances, always surprising, always welcome, bring with them the promise of connection, continuity and happiness to a family and a nation racked by the trauma and division of the 1970's.
In Marco Bellocchio's ''Good Morning, Night,'' shown at last year's New York Film Festival, Sansa is, by contrast, an icon of loneliness and torment. She plays one of the perpetrators of the era's most notorious political crimes -- the kidnapping and murder of the Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro in 1978 -- and she seems to absorb all of that decade's agony into her sensitive face and delicate frame.
In these two films, Sansa, an actress of exquisite restraint, tiptoes in the footsteps of the great screen divas of the past. There is nothing melodramatic, let alone operatic, in her presentation, but her quietness is its own kind of charisma. The best Italian movies these days tend to be thoughtful, graceful and humane, and Sansa, for all her modesty, may be the ideal star to carry them to the wider world.
