Mimmo Calopresti’s second film, hte follow up to his excellent debut "The Second Time" is another little gem about love but this time it’s brighter and less tragic than the story of the judge and the ex-terrorist. In "Notes of Love" the excellent Valeria Bruni Tedeschi plays Angela, a girl as rich as she is sad and neurotic. She finds it impossible to rid herself of certain obsessions such as trying to match colours and feelings, numbers and situations, rules for how to tread on the stripes on pedestrian crossings and avoiding people depending on how they are dressed. Angela is thirty, she has two friends and one desire: to fall in love. She thinks it might happen with her analyst (played by Calopresti himself) but the horrible, detached way he looks at her soon make her change her mind. Bruni Tedeschi shows Angela as a woman who changes direction as she goes along, who avoids other people’s looks with an embarrassed smile, a woman who is capable of aggression when confronted by someone who cannot understand her world of rules and solitude. The failure of her relationship with her analyst doesn’t turn into a tragedy only because Angela still believes that love exists, even for someone like her. Then Marco comes along, the separated cello teacher who Fabrizio Bentivoglio plays with the right mixture of allure and professionalism. Marco lives and teaches in the same building as the analyst and Angela sees him for the first time at the gate, he is wearing a red polo-shirt and Angela avoids him on the "wrong" side without getting too upset. Here begins an amusing game of appointments and notes between Angela, emotionally immature with respect to her friends, and the clumsy teacher who seems to be doing everything he can to delay what is destined to happen. Angela even agrees to spend some time in a home where she understands that she is not actually mentally ill, just that she needs to be accepted for what she is. She decides to leave the clinic, where you could imagine Gerard Depardieu in a cameo role, it doesn’t take much for her wish to be fulfilled, against her will.
From the ideology of a disturbing Turin which forms the backdrop for an doomed love, where Moretti’s amnesia makes the truth even more impenetrable, we move to a festive Rome, between nice days and rock concerts separated by Angela’s silent solitude or the antiseptic surroundings of the clinic. "Notes of Love" is a geometric film which adapts itself perfectly to the geometry of the city which hosts it. The scenes set outside Rome stongly define their purpose: a cold sea and a service station in the mist each serve as a shroud for an Angela on the verge of the abyss and the new, happy Angela pushing a broken-down car.
One last word on the two actors. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is the perfect actress for roles like this, people anonymous in the big city but who are the main characters in their own world. Fabrizio Bentivoglio is both deep and amusing at the same time, especially when he compares himself with his daughter’s generation.
