Us, a Little Better

 Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. 

Kahlil Gibran 

Sometimes films work precisely when they do not necessarily try to. Here, however, Daniele Luchetti seems to waver between an interesting story, supported by extraordinary performances, and a comedy that, in trying to lighten the subject matter, often ends up undermining it. 

The adoption process offers the film fertile ground. Becoming parents, in this case, means undergoing a series of assessments designed to establish one’s suitability to love, welcome, educate and take responsibility for the vulnerability of another human being. The institution must protect children who have already experienced abandonment, and this responsibility is understandable. Less understandable is the presumption that a procedure can measure in advance one’s ability to be a parent. Above all, one cannot help wondering why such scrutiny is reserved for those who adopt, while biological parenthood requires no prior certification. As though nature granted an authorization that the institution, by contrast, is willing to issue only after verifying that applicants meet a set of criteria. 

This is where the film identifies a genuine contradiction: the gap between the complexity of human relationships and institutions’ need to make them classifiable, predictable and manageable. A child is not a project whose success can be guaranteed through a preliminary assessment. Yet in the world of adoption, the possibility of building a family is also subject to this claim to control. 

At least in principle, the encounter between the two couples who meet along the way is an interesting one. On the one hand, there are Simone and Lucia, a firefighter and a nurse; on the other, a wealthy couple accustomed to a considerably more comfortable lifestyle. They share the desire to become parents, but the material resources available to them as they navigate life are profoundly different. When economic inequality becomes a tangible part of their relationship, what initially seemed like a friendship between people facing the same difficulty takes on distinctly more grotesque overtones. The proposal the wealthy couple makes to the other two is one of the film’s most successful moments, precisely because it pushes an issue to its most absurd consequences. 

The trouble is that the film does not trust its own contradictions enough. In trying to play down a sensitive subject, Luchetti repeatedly resorts to situations that achieve neither the corrosive force of the grotesque nor the freedom of the absurd. Instead, they slide into the realm of the ridiculous. And the ridiculous, unlike the grotesque, does not necessarily expose a contradiction: it can simply make it seem implausible. The problem is not that a story about adoption must necessarily be dramatic, nor that irony is out of place. It is that comedy should illuminate the absurdities of reality, not replace them with contrivances that ultimately weaken the story. 

When the film insists on entertaining at all costs, its substance begins to lose its solidity. The characters risk becoming instruments in an argument, situations seem engineered to provoke a reaction, and the complexity of relationships is sacrificed in pursuit of an effect. This is a limitation found in some contemporary Italian cinema: the assumption that addressing a serious subject means constantly alternating between moments of emotion and comic set pieces, as though audiences were incapable of engaging with complexity without being periodically relieved of the burden of thinking. 

Fortunately, there are Elio Germano and Maria Chiara Giannetta. Both deliver outstanding performances, lending the couple a human depth that the writing does not always manage to sustain. They both demonstrate exceptional acting ability, never needing to force their characters or emphasize their contradictions, but allowing them to emerge naturally through details, hesitations and subtle nuances. 

The title, Noi, un po’ meglio (Us, a Little Better), suggests a possible aspiration: not to become perfect parents, or human beings who finally live up to an ideal model, but to try to change something within ourselves through our relationship with another person. It is an interesting insight because it challenges the idea that there is a definitive form of emotional maturity. Yet this very insight would have required greater trust in the characters’ ambivalence and less dependence on the mechanisms of comedy. 

My present self and my self of a little while ago are certainly two different people. But I cannot really say which is better. 

Michel de Montaigne