The new film from Paolo Sorrentino, one of Italian Cinema’s most hotly tipped young directors, is a strange and fascinating black comedy drama, bursting with sardonic visual invention and wry humour.

Geremia de Geremei (Rizzo) is a small town tailor and loan shark, living in a dank, cramped apartment with his bed-ridden mother, despite his apparent wealth. A gnarled, stooped miser, shuffling around a dilapidated housing estate, Geremia is a hideous example of lecherous avarice, cruelly dominating the lives of the luckless oddballs that come to him for money, while all the time insisting they think of him as a nothing more than a ‘family friend’. Asked by the parents of a local beauty queen to lend money to finance her upcoming wedding, Geremia develops an obsession for the bride, and callously closes in on the beautiful but much younger Rosalba (Chiatti).

That Sorrentino makes following in the slug trail of such an unsympathetic, misanthropic character such a rapturous experience is testament not only to Rizzo’s curmudgeonly performance as the gnomic Geremia, but also to the young Neapolitan directors’ giddy sense of cinematic technique. Ably served by Director of Photography Luca Bigazzi, Sorrentino ensures each sequence is as ravishingly composed and sleekly sophisticated as the last. Employing an atmospheric soundtrack, featuring the otherworldly warbling of Antony And The Johnsons, The Family Friend is as drunk on style, both visually and aurally, as Sorrentino’s previous film, 2005’s surprise crossover hit The Consequences Of Love. However, while that film was a hypnotically streamlined, exaggeratedly sleek, exercise in stylish ennui, The Family Friend takes a more freewheeling approach, creating a convincingly skewed and self contained world, existing on its own surreal, internal logic.

At times Felliniesque in its freeform weirdness, the film perhaps tries to pack almost too much invention into its winding narrative. Enigmatic tableaux, quirky digressions and an occasionally over artful approach has lead some critics to accuse the film of self-consciousness. While there are definitely elements of The Family Friend where style is fore-grounded over substance, the deliciously unsentimental nature of Sorrentino’s fable of power, need and desire, will appeal to the fans of David Lynch or Coen Brothers films, where psychological and narrative realism perhaps take a back seat to more stylistic and sensual pleasures.

Ambitious, audacious, droll, and occasionally cruel, The Family Friend confirms Sorrentino as an exciting cinematic stylist, with a signature of great originality.

Paolo Sorrentino – Cannes Film Festival 2006

Paolo Sorrentino already is being hailed as one of the high hopes of new Italian cinema. With the smash hit The Consequences of Love and The Family Friend he has quashed all questions of whether Italian cinema has lost its visual flair. Sorrentino always has displayed classy, cinematic eye right from his first feature, the cleverly conceived One Man Up in 2001. He is part of what has become known as the Neapolitan school, a hotbed of Italian cinematic creativity.

"Everything began with a simple observation which I made when watching my neighbours. They are elderly people who live in perfect harmony but equally know important difficulties. One is obliged to observe that even in a family of this type, relations can deteriorate. Geremia represents evil incarnate. I wanted to place this character, a pitiless usurer, in relationship to elements such as money, friends, his mother and women."

"For this film, I thought of Fellini and his work. He had such a rapid manner of describing characters and faces by presenting their comic and tragic aspects in just two scenes. For me, I need a whole film to reach such a result."