Io, loro e Lara

I enjoied it very much. Intelligent and sweet. Tumbs up for Carlo Verdone

Like his contemporaries Lino Banfi and Adriano Celantano, we see too little of the work of Italian comic Carlo Verdone, in English language distribution.

Here he is playing the Catholic missionary back from Africa where the physical hardships had worn him down, to be confronted with his family scrambling after dad marries a Balkan carer blonde and starts dissipating the inheritance, to the alarm of shrink sister Bonaiuto and coke sniffer brother Giallini. Complications ensue in the form of the blonde's sexy but tense daughter Chiatti.

Add in plot elements like the three African girls or Chiatti's video sex work, which assert while others, like the intimidating bishop, drop out, to make the thing harder to predict but the structure is classic farce, building to the fake family diner with social worker Finocchiaro.

They do have difficulty making the carefully structured plot hold attention beyond this but the outcome is agreeable and the playing and film making superior.

Certainly not one of the best Verdone'e comedies but I still found "Me, Them and Lara" an entertaining comedy. Much of the jokes and the irony in the movie is based on the contrast between the main character Father Carlo Mascolo, a missionary priest living in Africa who, due to his faith crisis, he goes back to his family in Italy to reflect upon his situation, and his relatives who are very different from him, being less meditative and more practical and cynical. In the plot Lara, played by the stunning Laura Chiatti, has a central role. Father Mascolo has a slight crush on her while his siblings want to get rid of her because she inherits their house according to the will of their father who just lost Olga, his girlfriend and also Lara's mother. Good jokes and comical situation make this movie enjoyable.

Verdone is Father Carlo, an Italian missionary in Africa, suffering a personal crisis and deciding to go back home for a while.

Home is Roma, where is father and two siblings live. Being a cynical city, inhabited by sarcastic, unpleasant people, the poor Carlo is thrown even deeper into a pit of doubts. The trouble is, none of his emotional issues ring true.

Moreover, all his family members are petty and unpleasant.

Carlo's father remarried Olga, a much younger Easter European woman and doesn't get along with his children. Besides, the old guy is selfish and follows his sexual drive rather than trying to be fair to his family, Carlo's brother is a cocaine addict and his sister is a self-involved psychiatrist, with a silly teenage daughter.

To complicate matters, Olga has her own daughter, the pretty - and slutty - Lara who quickly steals the show.

With her entrance, any attempt to deal with Carlo's emotional issues fly down the drain and the tone shifts from social satire to geriatric infatuation, with plenty of scenes with the scantily clad young actress in mildly provocative scenes.

The ending is tacked in roughly and incongruously, with a vague message of a dysfunctional family being better than nothing.

I have been a fan of director/writer/actor Carlo Verdone since the late 70s. In the 80s his film have been sent to memory by an entire generation, and many people can actually remember quotes from those films. But now his motion pictures don't have the same qualities: interesting characters, solid scripts, memorable lines. This film in particular lacks of many of those. What happens is predictable and sometimes i can't believe such things can really happen. Of course a film is not supposed to talk about real life, but Verdone's characters are usually drawn from real life and that's their strength. Io, loro e Lara disappointed me. 5 out of 10