To me, this movie is perfection.

Good movie but grossly overrated

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Once again Ozpetek takes us to a magical place, and entrances us with a sensitive and inspiring film. His two most famous films are probably FACING WINDOWS (2003, see my review) and SACRED HEART (2005, see my review), which are both classics and masterpieces of world cinema. His film LOOSE CANNONS (2010, see my review) is marvellous without quite being a classic. This one is somewhat better. It is difficult to describe, because it combines genres in a bold and astonishing way. Ozpetek took many risks with this film, which in the hands of a lesser director could have collapsed into a heap. But, as usual, Ozpetek makes the impossible work. The lead actor in the film is Elio Germano, who plays the character Pietro. He is utterly charming and delightful, and he holds the film together wonderfully. Germano has appeared in 49 films despite being only 34 years old, so he is a consummate professional. The entire cast is excellent, and there is a magnificent and tragic performance by Anna Proclemer as the elusive and mysterious Livia Morosini, whom Germano has to seek out under a false name in order to discover the truth of what happened in 1943. She was 88 at the time she played this, her very last role, and she died a few months later, in 2013. She was a magnificent actress but she only made 21 films in 60 years. However, those roles that she did play included George Sand, Annie Sullivan (the woman who taught Helen Keller, as portrayed in THE MIRACLE WORKER by Anne Bancroft in 1962), O'Neill's Anna Christie (originally portrayed by Garbo on screen), and Nastasja Filippova in an Italian TV series adaptation of Dostoevsky's THE IDIOT (1959, not to be confused with the modern Russian series based on that novel). The story of this film mixes fantasy with reality, always a dicey business, but Ozpetek gets away with it. Germano is thrilled when he finds a house to rent in the Monteverde district of Rome at an affordable price. But what he does not realize is that the property is haunted by a group of people who all died there in 1943 but who are trapped in the house and unable to move on. Germano is a lonely fellow, and he comes to accept the presence of the ghosts and interacts with them; they all speak to one another normally, but others cannot see them. This may sound absurd, but Ozpetek's sense of humour and whimsy results in our accepting the absurdity and watching the film sympathetically as the events unwind. Germano takes on the task of finding out what happened to the ghosts, how and why they died, and who betrayed them, because until they can realize this themselves they are stranded. So yet another layer of the film then takes shape, namely the solving of a historical mystery. This film interweaves humour, pathos, tragedy, comedy, fantasy and reality. That is a lot of threads to draw together, but it succeeds. The underlying unifier to all of this is Ozpetek's warm and gentle sense of humanity.

On the surface we really are told a fairy-tale. But just on the surface. The movie is (to me) all about love(or passion) versus obsessionin in addition to loyalty versus betrayal all in the life of people. We see how a group of players loyal to themselves, their art, and to freedom manages to live and reach eventually beyond their time and life (even if they are just imaginary ghosts). Betraying member, who were loyal to herself only... A monster she became eventually. Not to spoil too much, lastly how important is doing or wanting things with passion and love no matter what it is (making cakes or becoming an artist) is presented in cute and clever way by the director. It seems that the message is that all that "small / ordinary" people are in fact the real/biggest/highest/ultimate "human" beings if they are okay with what they are and if they have intimacy, love and passion in their life.Being human is not that complicated and in fact is full of richness in so many distinct conditions and times

Even though some ideas can be appreciated, nothing is really new. A haunted house? Victims of Nazi racism? A difficult life for a gay young man? Mobbing in a solicitor's office? A thousand films have dealt with this in a more profound way.Adding a cameo with Platinette as a sort of a metaphysical seer surrounded by transvestites is not enough to turn a quite superficial story into an Almodòvar-style comedy.If the director wants to go all the way, then let him go all the way. But I have not seen the courage to push the story to its extreme possibilities; Ozpetek is satisfied with giving us a quite ordinary and reassuring fairy-tale with a sort of a happy ending.Let's just think about all the plot opportunities suggested by a group of people from the 1940s brought into the 2010s...all the director does is letting us know that the young son of the Turkish couple is still alive!Germano is on the scene from beginning to end, and I must say he is not bad at all. The actors around him, on the contrary, look stereotyped and without a real insight on their character. Definitely not the best I have seen from Ozpetek.

A masterpiece of Ferzan Ozpetek that finally, after years, departs from his usual production. The plot is developed in a fun and fluid matter, and it is impossible to be bored or get lost along the way. Also perfect character development, very credible thanks to the extraordinary performances, one of all those of Elio Germano; his close-up in the final scene is an apotheosis. Great mastery of the musicians in recreating a magnificent soundtrack of the years Thirty that it falls within the context perfectly. There is not a flaw in the entire movie except, perhaps, that the ending is almost trivial and I would rather different. All in all a great movie to recommend highly!