Café Roma

The café called The Place is full of people every day. A mysterious man (Valerio Mastandrea ) sits at one of the tables from morning to evening, followed by a disparate group of people. The man is known for fulfilling people's wishes, in return for doing something for him. The Italian director Paolo Genovese based his new film on the concept of a contract with the devil , who also built his previous film Absolute Strangers on a similar principle of the question of morality.

It's hard to make a two-hour film about one scene so that it doesn't get boring. The idea is interesting, by telling the story of different people, connecting it like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and letting the viewer think in vain about what will happen next. But as with a song whose words he knows by heart, the viewer begins to overtake the plot. This film is like a simple kit, the pieces of which we soon put together in the right place and then we don't really like to put it together.

Length is the greatest enemy of The Place. But the problem is just the monotonous repetition of one scene and music. In the background of the film, it is forced in several places, giving the impression that the film is ending, which is added by the subsequent editing and the second of the black screen. When the story continues and exactly the same again, it only intensifies the infinity of the footage. In the end, we only get the answers to the questions we have already figured out, while some facts remain unclear and unresolved.

Overall, The Place is a film with an undoubtedly very interesting theme. Unfortunately, in the end, the weaknesses outweigh the strengths, and the original concept seems kind of lost. It is believed that similar films, such as The Beginning or Predestination, do not communicate everything immediately and often end in a certain moment of astonishment to the viewer. In this film, however, the essential moments are divided into too long footage and the end is so uncertain that we feel that even the author did not enjoy it. Instead of fulfilled wishes, it is simply a work that attracts us, we enjoy an hour, then we wait for the end and the real end an hour later we go half asleep.