But Forever in My Mind Reviews

Now that Che Guevara has become a fashion icon immortalized on pricey t-shirts (who cares about all that Marxist Revolutionary stuff — he's so cute in that beret!) Gabriele Muccino's sharp-edged comedy is a welcome relief. The plot is pure, typical coming-of-age comedy: Sixteen-year-old Silvio (Silvio Muccino, the director's younger brother and script collaborator) is desperately to lose his virginity and has his sights set on Valentina (Giulia Carmignani), his pal Martino's (Simone Pagani) girlfriend. The backdrop, however, is the stuff of political satire: Silvio's high school has been taken over by student radicals agitating for a new school system. Their agenda is a little fuzzy — they're against the standardization and privatization of their state school — but they've gone ahead and locked themselves inside the school until somebody does something about it. Silvio sees in the unrest the perfect opportunity to seduce Valentina (the kids plan on spending the night at the school), but his parents (Luca De Filippo and Anna Galiena) are having none of it, even though they themselves were once part of the legendary student demonstrations of 1968. Silvio is a warm, likeable kind of guy, but the film gets bogged down in the details of his romantic problems, which, unless you're 15 or still a virgin, aren't terribly interesting. Director Muccino's critique of political consciousness among the young, however, is right on target: The slogans are meaningless, the rhetoric is empty and political viewpoint is simply an element of style. But he also understands how hard it is for young people to find their voices when it seems everything has already been said, and he reserves his greatest scorn for the survivors of '68 who scoff at their children's superficiality when they themselves have settled into lives of bourgeois complacency.