The Italian writer-director Saverio Constanzo has offered the Venice film festival some unpretentious calorific fun with this enjoyable film: a tasty, showbizzy crowd-pleaser and romantic melodrama with a vivid streak of surreal absurdity in the tradition of Federico Fellini’s The White Sheik or Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.
It is the tale of an unconventionally beautiful duckling who becomes more of a swan than the glamorous people she idolises; her dreams come true – or sort of true – in 1950s Rome in the heyday of the giant Cinecittà film studio. There are seductive performances from Lily James as the Liz Taylor-ish American movie diva, Willem Dafoe as her elegant, kindly confidant, Rachel Sennott as the disaffected up-and-coming actor who wants to unseat James’s star, and a lovely turn from relative newcomer Rebecca Antonaci as the bewildered and unlikely heroine.
