Director Francesca Archibugi has chosen to strictly follow the Sandro Veronesi's book which the movie is based on. "The hummingbird" has been a bestseller in Italy, awarded with the top national literary prize. It is a story of resistence to suffering and pain, which the main character eventually overcomes to gain a fuller and more satisfying life. You can absorb the book, any book, at your own tempo, distributing the reading time in days, if not weeks. You pause and you have the time to elaborate the evenements and to reconnect them to the whole story. But movies are different. As audience, we don't control the flow. Screenwriters should do it for us. But here, in two hours, we get a couple of suicides, three terminal illnesses and a few other tragedies. A bit too much, for my taste. We see young actors transform themselves into parched old masks (and back to baby faces) in a fistful of seconds.
Movies are like lovers: if they stay faithful, they can't be too pretty.
Movies are like lovers: if they stay faithful, they can't be too pretty.