Regalo di Natale (1986) User Reviews

Christmas game

[BandSAboutMovies · 7/10 · 24 December 2022]

Starting around 1983, cinepanettoni movies started to be released every Christmas in Italy. The name means cinema and panettone, a sweet bread traditionally given during the season. A lot of these movies are about Italian families abroad getting into hijinks. The holidays - just as over here - are a great time for people to get out of the house and into theaters.

If you've only seen his films Arcane Sorcerer, Nine Deaths a Week, Zeder and The House with the Laughing Windows, you may not think director and writer Pupi Avati is someone filled with the Christmas spirit. Yet he made this, a film in which Christmas night is spent amongst a group of former friends - Gabriele (Alessandro Haber), Stefano (George Eastman), Ugo (Gianni Cavina) and Franco (Diego Abatantuono) - who get back together after years of distrust. They want to be friends again but are unsure how to do it. Perhaps ripping off the rich and mysterious Avvocato Santelia (Carlo Delle Piane) in a game of poker is the way to make their lives come back together.

Each of them is at a bad place in their lives. Gabriele is tired of his newspaper job and just wants enough money to be able to write about what he really loves, the films of John Ford. Stefano is struggling to keep up his heterosexual ruse but truly loves men. Ugo is divorced and ugly at love. Only Franco is rich enough to get Santelia to play a game of poker. However, he's now the owner of a cinema and doesn't want anything to do with Ugo. His secret is that his life seems rich and powerful on the outside but he must answer to so many people. Money could help. Can't it always? Uggo promises that he will make up for a past slight to Ugo, who still doubts his former associate.

Franco and the lawyer are the ones in the lead as the game begins and as we see the cards play, we also learn what happened in the past: Franco's first wife Martina - the only woman he has loved - made love to Uggo. As the stakes go higher, the true reasons for the evening will become known.

This was so popular that in 2014, Avati made a sequel, La rivincita di Natale, with the same cast. That film even has a scene that discusses the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, the work of art that The House with the Laughing Windows is based on.

It's so odd to see a smiling ladykiller George Eastman in this movie, playing cards instead of doing what he's better known for, ripping into a woman's stomach and eating her unborn baby.

The dramatic poker card games turned out the real personality of the players

[Dodo-21 · 10/10 · 16 October 1999]

One of the most beautiful story of contemporary Italian cinema. Must see for the perfect and dramatic poker card game written by the greatest italian expert of card games Giovanni Bruzzi, that turned out the real personality of the players. At the end of the film, you will be surprised by a revelation.

Once you watch this movie you won't be able to play poker anymore..

[albertomassa · 27 July 2001]

Once you watch this movie you won't be able to play poker anymore. The best movie of ever about poker, performed by five magnificent actors...five as the number of the cards they hold in their hands.

where the ice another people ruggedly en-swathes .../Eunomia,Flora,Hygiea,Koronis,Merxia,Gefion,Erigone,Naëma ...

[Cristi_Ciopron · 18 July 2007]

Two of the actors that can be seen in Christmas Present give performances of an impressive metaphysical depth:it is utterly shocking.These two roles ( Santelia and Ugo) are better that almost any other roles on any screen;though,CDP gave a role as good in Graduation Party.Anyway,if you are interested in a couple of flawless performances watch Carlo Delle Piane and Gianni Cavina in Christmas Present;they both have amazingly nuanced and precise approaches,and very sharp and pure.CDP is matchless and absolutely stunning and astounding.Sometimes,I dare say to myself that he is the greatest actor that ever lived (though I regularly bestow this title upon other actors).My appreciation for Carlo Delle Piane is boundless. CDP's many intensely wonderful performances,in various movies (Graduation Party, Christmas Present, Bride and Groom,to name a few of Avati's) give a direct immediate strong physical delight.When you test these roles,you find them to be very intelligent and energetic and authentic.His originality and artistic purity and honesty are striking.

It was fair that an actor of Carlo Delle Piane's greatness was recognized and treated as such by a director like Avati.

Christmas Present is more spectacular (because much more stylized) than Graduation Party,but not better.It has a great and chilling theme:the loss and treason and baseness,human features that in Pupi Avati's movies are never the object of some moralistic denunciation;the canvas is very simple,and the film is a masterpiece of concision,lucidity, precision,power and economy.

A poker game gathers around the table five men:an erotically insatiable older man ( Santelia);a bald and Podgy man, slipshod and a slob ("Lele",a movie critic that talks about Ford:Alessandro Haber,that some of us consider a first-hand actor!);a handsome man that has a Nietzschean mustache ("Franco":Diego Abatantuono);Franco's former friend,"Ugo",an intelligent and somehow fascinating man:Gianni Cavina,a slick and ambiguous man;and lastly a bearded and spectacled fellow (the skilled and cool Luigi Montefiori ).This is almost the entire cast.Another character is "Martina" (Kristina Sevieri),a young woman that gives CDP the occasion to speak about her while he is playing cards.We are also shown,in a dreamy and bright light,scenes from Franco's marriage.

The most uncanny aspect of this movie,and the most shocking,is its sadism.Avati implicitly acknowledges that in silence one savors man's pain:this hidden,mute cruelty,the fact that one may find and indeed finds Franco's pain savory and secretly enjoyable.The fact is that Franco's debacle is savored and enjoyed by the viewer.

Avati has found the regard,the look of the greatest,of Maupassant and Schopenhauer:more profound, or deeper than reality itself.Avati's is the metaphysical regard cast upon the reality.Within Avati's work, Christmas Present is a movie of stylization;while Bride and Groom is a movie of notation,a note-book.In "Graduation …" we had beautiful marine images;in "Xmas …" the photography is as a matter of fact straightly functional (of course,there are also the dreamy bright images from Franco's past,but this brightness and dreaminess are quite functional themselves,in the sense that they are symbolic and codified).

Alighieri wrote,around 1310, this:"ye men at variance/With every virtue, full of every vice/Wherefore are ye not scattered from the world?";and:"We passed still farther onward, where the ice/Another people ruggedly en-swathes,/Not downward turned, but all of them reversed."

Avati's characters are like meteors, comets, asteroids.