Decidedly weak tea (and not so hot, either), with filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli holding forth from the head of the table as a rambling raconteur, remembering the days of his youth among the artsy English ladies of pre-war and mid-war Florence ("I've warmed both hands before the fires of Botticelli and Michelangelo") as well as a couple of brassier American ladies. It soon gets away from personal-interest stuff to do with the development of an artist (young Franco is disguised behind the pseudonym of "Luca"), and gets instead into general-interest stuff on the rise of fascism and the slow uptake of decent people, especially dotty old ladies ("Mussolini is the gentleman who makes the trains run on time"). The drift of the thing is oddly and quite literally depersonalized. To gather together Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Judi Dench, Cher, and Lily Tomlin in the same cast perhaps constitutes a feat in itself, but to give them each enough to do would have been one worth talking about. Charlie Lucas, Baird Wallace. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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