The Italian comedy project directed by Simone Godano about spouses who have exchanged bodies is quite trivial, but at the same time romantic, sincere and boring. The film “Not Your Body” (2017) with an IMDb rating of 6.50 has the majority of positive reviews from viewers and sparing reviews from film critics.
Games with stereotypes
The work of Simone Godano can serve as an example of a fun and incredibly charming movie, although not without visible roughness and blemishes. The creators of the tape seem to be trying to cover several topics - reflecting on the possibility of access to someone else's consciousness and conduct gender research. At the same time, the romantic film “Not Your Body”, the actors and roles of which were selected by the types under the vigilant control of the production group, turned out to be very relevant, fervently exaggerating stereotypical situations repeatedly used by the cinema.
Short storyline
The narration of the film “Not Your Body” (2017) introduces the viewer to the marital trait of the main characters - husband, neurosurgeon Andrea (Pierfranchesko Favino) and wife, TV host Sofia (Kasia Smutnyak). The couple is experiencing a crisis in relationships and is pretty close to divorce. Spouses quarrel constantly, do not delve into each other’s affairs and problems, spending most of their time at work. Once Andrea brings home "Charlie" - the result of his scientific experiment, a device supposedly reading thoughts. The mechanism jams, and when the hero tries to set it up, he simultaneously connects himself and his wife to the sensors. The device fails, and Sofia and Andrea exchange consciousness. After the first shock, a kind of humility comes to the spouses, they try to live each other's life. But the scientist does not abandon attempts to establish the work of the experimental apparatus and return everything to normal.
No surprises
After a brief description of the plot “Not Your Body”, it becomes clear that it does not contain any surprises. It is easy for a sophisticated film fan to assume that initially the narrative of the tape will be full of jokes and gags on the theme “a woman in a man’s body, a man in a woman’s body”. Over time, after an impressive series of amusing fiasco, recriminations and disputes, the characters will get used to the spouse’s body, solve problems at work and, undoubtedly, will come to mutual agreement and understanding, which the couple hadn’t had a long time before. As critics say in reviews of "Not Your Body," the entire tape consists of the above-mentioned genre stamps. But more than another stamped is the climax television monologue Andrea, still in the body of Sofia. In it, the hero rants about how society ruthlessly presses on the "weaker sex", forcing women to dress and look perfect.
Advantages and disadvantages
However, some cinema experts in reviews of “Not Your Body,” argue that in the farce-romantic cinema Godan the main thing is not the content in the narrative of innovative delights and surprises, but how emotional and fun events are developing. On this side, according to the verdict of experts, the film is doing quite well. Actors who played the role of the central characters created a charming on-screen duet. Both performers are funny enough, especially when they intentionally grotesquely demonstrate the habits of the opposite sex. Spectator reviews of “Not Your Body” express regret that there are far less touching and hilarious moments than we would like. Critics did not escape the attention of the fact that in certain places the film is clearly stalled. Perhaps if the creative tandem of the scriptwriters added a drive line to the narrative - a criminal adventure, the success of the tape was more impressive. But genre purity and emphasis on the emotional evolution of characters also has its own charm.
Exaggerated Images
Special attention in the reviews of “Not Your Body” authors-contributors pay to the images of the main characters. Sophia in the body of Andre behaves predictably hysterically, not calming down even for a moment, and her husband, not lagging behind, exposes a bloated conceit and emphasized brutality. Embodying the director’s idea, the performers show not individual instances of the unfortunate who find themselves in a strange body, but hyperbolic images, in which many stereotypical moments about the behavior of women and men are concentrated. The excesses in the characteristics of the main characters are clearly noticeable and quite successfully used by the director in order to amuse the audience. But conceptually, distortions in the behavior of the couple due to the relationship with the study of consciousness are acceptable, so the project comes to an almost unpredictable plot twist.