The Price of Family Review: A Cruel Game That Takes Everyone Prisoner | Natale a tutti i costi

Cast: Christian De Sica, Angela Finocchiaro, Claudio Colica, Dharma Mangia Woods, Fiorella Mari

Director: Giovanni Bognetti

Streaming Platform: Netflix

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3.5/5 (three and a half stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

The Price of Family (Natale a tutti i costi) arrives on Netflix on Monday 19 December, a film for the whole family directed by Giovanni Bognetti (The babysitters, The Mammone) which refers to a great French cinematic success directed by Alexandra Leclére and entitled Price of Parenting. However, unlike the Cisalpine ancestor, the Netflix original film produced together with Sony International Pictures and Colorado Film is even more biting and poisonous in the portrait it makes of the Delle Fave family, led by Christian De Sica and Angela Finocchiaro.

In our review of The Price of Family, we will focus on how much Bognetti’s remake deviates not only from the more dismissed and light-hearted tones of the progenitor from beyond the Alps but also from the pre-established rules of Christmas cinepanettone despite the presence of De Sica, historical and highly recognizable face of decades of tradition of scurrilous and shrewd appointments in the dining room during the holidays.

The Price of Family Review: The Story

Carlo and Anna are unable to understand the sudden loneliness at home after their two children Emilio and Alessandra decide to leave the sheepfold to pursue an independent life, away from mum and dad. Destroyed by pain, they try in every way to bring them back home, even at the cost of staging a “Cafonal” pantomime to force them to give up leaving for the holidays and spend Christmas with their families. The consequences will be unpredictable and very entertaining.

Life goes by and the children grow up, but Carlo (Christian De Sica) and Anna (Angela Finocchiaro) struggle to accept it. Especially if the children are disliked like Alessandra (Dharma Mangia Woods) and Emilio (Claudio Colica), who after leaving the nursery and moving to the city to pursue their ambitions, stop making themselves heard, being seen, going to funerals relatives and, the icing on the cake, to show up at home for the Christmas holidays. Anna and Carlo, angry and desperate, decide to deceive their children into believing they have inherited six million euros from an old aunt. The plan works, Emilio and Alessandra reappear in mum and dad’s life; but with them, new problems also appear.

Thus begins The Price of Family, an amusing and gentle Italian remake of the French blockbuster Mes très chers enfants by Alexandra Leclère, here directed by Giovanni Bognetti. The local director, already the author behind the camera of popular comedies such as Babysitters and Il Mammone, signs a cinematographic makeover that distances itself light years from the vulgar and blatantly peasant comedy of the Italian tradition of cinepanettoni, respecting however the ambiguity of its characters.

The Price of Family Review and Analysis

So let’s start from the biggest difference with the Cisalpine parent: compared to Leclére’s film, The Price of Family substantially manages to be even more cruel and vitriolic towards the attitudes and psychologies of its protagonists, putting in front of the camera a game of massacre that spares no one; starting from Anna and Carlo up to their two children Alessandra and Emilio, emblem of a contemporary family maliciously willing to do anything to achieve their most intimate goals and desires. If the two parents have no qualms about putting on a little theater of falsehood to bring their children “who have flown away from the nest” and become ungrateful, closer to them, the latter is also portrayed by the camera and by Bognetti’s writing (here also in the role of the screenwriter of the film) as profiteers indifferent to the displeasure of mom and dad. But will it be like this?

The Price of Family succeeds perfectly in its major task, which is to be able to package an audiovisual product far from the vulgarity and vulgarity of the cinepanettoni without renouncing a good dose of hilarity and brilliant comedy of misunderstanding situations; the result is a caustic and at times very bad remake, which also intelligently reflects on the status quo of the contemporary Italian family.

If in the cruel game played by the members of the Delle Fave family, no one is truly unscathed, one wonders how far the characters in the film with a Christmas background directed by Giovanni Bognetti are so far from the paroxysmal and over-the-top portraits that populated the local cinepanettoni of the past. If the light-hearted comic feature films directed by Neri Parenti and Carlo Vanzina staged entr’actes inhabited by narrow-minded Italians, peasants and profiteers, in The Price of Family the family of protagonists is not so different from the stars who made blockbusters the Christmas feature films by De Laurentiis.

Obviously, in the film written and directed by Giovanni Bognetti, there is a grace and a greater balance in the writing and the themes, it deals with, which brings it closer to the school of French film comedy than to the tradition of the Bel Paese. To round off the tone, between predictable fits of gigioneria and excellent acting skills, is Christian De Sica, once again the heir to a way of making comedy on the big and small screen that seems more borrowed from the theater of the past than from the legacy of cinepanettoni to which he also gave prestige.

For this reason, The Price of Family works unexpectedly well, therefore supported not only by a solid adapted screenplay that transfers the best of the original film to typically local contexts and situations but because by the choice to entrust the male lead role to Christian De Sica follows an already beaten path capable of attracting a vast audience of the streaming platform at the same time. Partially shunning the boorish comedy that had characterized the Italian Christmas film tradition in past years, this year Netflix packs a local remake that works on several levels and which entertains a potential audience of spectators of all ages, without forgetting qualities such as grace and genuine fun.

The Price of Family Review: The Last Words

The Price of Family by Giovanni Bognetti shuns the vulgar comedy that has characterized Italian festive cinema for years and restarts from its absolute star performer, Christian De Sica, to stage the delicate and corrosive remake of a French film. The result is a genuinely hilarious and very wicked portrait of a family willing to do anything to spend Christmas together, even playing a pantomime… unexpected!