Four to Dinner Review: An Intriguing And Imperfect Love Film With Little Depth And Variety (Quattro Metà)

Starring: Ilenia Pastorelli, Matilde Gioli, Giuseppe Maggio

Director: Alessio Maria Federici

Streaming Platform: Netflix (click to watch)

Filmyhype Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and half star) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

The myth of the soul mate has warmed the hearts of the most romantics since time immemorial. Plato was the first to theorize the concept in his Symposium: human beings were originally perfect individuals and hermaphrodites, but the gods, jealous of their happiness, decided to cut them into two distinct parts. Since that day, every person is forced to wander incomplete, in search of the mirror half of himself hidden in another individual. How to find a soul mate, who by definition is unique, on a planet inhabited by nearly eight billion people?

Four to Dinner (4 Meta) questions the validity of this research, telling a romantic story set in two parallel universes. Taking up the central theme of Paul Auster’s masterpiece, 4321, Alessio Maria Federici narrates the implications inherent in the small details that can upset a life: an interesting reflection on the meaning of love and on being soul mates. Although the fulcrum of the story is very intriguing, the film – among the Netflix releases of January 2022 – is not very courageous in its evolutions, brought to the screen by an adequate acting, but with a script that abandons itself too easily to situations already explored in films. similar.

Four to Dinner: The Story

Invited to a dinner on the terrace, four people are paired up by their best friends. Dario (Giuseppe Maggio) is a womanizer lawyer who will try to seduce Giulia (Matilde Gioli), a cynical and very direct mathematician, while Matteo (Matteo Martari) immediately falls in love with Chiara (Ilenia Pastorelli), a romantic woman looking for a relationship lasting.

The events now seem marked, their lives have taken a very specific direction: but what would have happened if Matteo hadn’t phoned Chiara the following morning? Very often an apparently negligible detail is capable of changing the course of the story, like any coffee taken during the break that leads to meeting the love that has always been expected. Fortuitous encounters, tricks of fate and strong standpoints punctuate the narration of two parallel but equally probable truths, intertwining in stories that reject the myth of the soul mate to remind us how reality can be changeable.

Four to Dinner is a romantic comedy that does not aim to upset the viewer’s existence but wants to transport it in 90 minutes of lightness through a simple story that branches off in opposite directions. However, in the management of these “parallel universes” lies a flaw in the staging the passage between the two realities is not hinted at by anything in particular but becomes clear only when the composition of the couples is evident.

Four to Dinner Review and Analysis

The management would have been much more natural and elegant if in the writing phase they had found an object, a place, or anything with the didactic power to tell the leap into the second narrative. The screenplay of this Netflix Italy production therefore lives on contrasting sensations: the depth of the writing fails to involve all the details of the plot, despite the excellent idea that is at the center of everything. The characterization of the characters is sometimes coarse and, as if that were not enough, these personalities do not reveal themselves through their actions or words but are literally presented to us in the opening minutes of the film.

The romantic and the cynical woman, the womanizer and the book lover: four protagonists who mix with each other in always problematic relationships – who remind us how complicated it is to establish a serious relationship with a person, other than soulmates – brought in scene from a cast that adapts to the lack of brilliance of their dialogues, sometimes over the top and uninspired. Even if the ambivalence of the script proves to be the real weakness of the film, the remaining technical sector certainly does not help Four to Dinner (Quattro Metà) 4 Meta to regain altitude.

The soundtrack marks almost every moment of the film, but it’s being random prevents it from giving a meaningful cut to the important scenes. The direction of Federici – who had already co-directed The Jackal series for Netflix, does everything in its power to give a cinematic cut to an at times redundant sequence of dialogues between the two. characters: the constantly moving camera widens the field, turns around the protagonists, gets closer to the faces. But everything is made less incisive by a hasty editing which leaves neither the speaking character nor the listener’s reactions observed, cutting too quickly in the middle of exchanges and thus preventing the establishment of a credible relationship between the characters.

The apartments of the protagonists are furnished with what would seem extreme care – trying to give back some of their personalities through the interiors – but they are overflowing with objects that clash with each other, suggesting how good will has tripped over overdoing it. Unfortunately photography does not thrive on particular intuitions, because it is managed with little depth and variety, he night scenes are characterized by a very strong dichotomy between light and dark areas, while the daytime shots are very bright and without any trace of contrasts.

Four to Dinner The Final Words

Four to Dinner is a romantic comedy that winks at Paul Auster’s masterpiece: the film raises an excellent food for thought, leaving the viewer to wonder about the true meaning of “soul mate”. Unfortunately, the evolutions that follow the central fulcrum are not always able to emulate its quality, making the attention captured with less courageous choices diminish. The acting is at times lacking in brilliance, but it is the writing of the dialogues that represents the real weakness of the story. Starting from these premises it was complicated to raise a film that is on balance a good pastime, and in fact Alessio Maria Federici cannot: his lively direction has to deal with repeated and at times faded situations.