The Invite is yet another (successful) investigation into love and sex We're in the era of love complexity, baby
Imagine the scene: after endless arguments with your longtime partner, you manage to invite the couple that lives upstairs, who seem too cool to be true, to dinner. You want to make a great impression, you end up thinking too much about it, you get a little squeezing. Immediately, as soon as they walk through the door of your well-kept (by you) apartment, you understand that something is wrong, that there is some embarrassment, that their couple is very, very different from yours. For the better, it makes you think, and the excitement goes up a little. So insist, and what happens in the next two hours will be a game of mirrors and reversals, and this pair of strangers will prove illuminating, because they will be able to bring back doubts that you had repressed very far inside you, deep in your chest. And then we have to do the math.
The Invite, plot and cast of Olivia Wilde's film from September 16 in theaters
This, without too many spoilers, is what happens in The Invite - The Pleasure Is All Ours, a film directed by Olivia Wilde (the third, after the adorable Booksmart - Revenge of the Losers and the Underwhelming Don't Worry Darling) and written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack. The story of two couples, respectively the bored and unhappy Olivia Wilde (Angela) and Seth Rogen (Joe) and the very sensual and libertine Edward Norton (Hawk) and Penelope Cruz (Pina) who meet and clash, measure themselves and reveal themselves to each other, asking (and asking) what is a normal couple? Is sexual desire still taboo, even within a couple? How do the dynamics change with the years that pass?
Films about love, today
A film that is at times intimate, at times suffocating, embarrassing and rarefied, which is part of the film-that all take place in a closed space and that continues the genre of the moment very well: that of films that are born as rom-coms but that in reality investigate between the serious and the facetious what it means to be in a relationship today. There were The Drama and Materialists, but also Past Lives, Is This Thing On and, in Venice, A Story by Anna Foglietta. Added to these films is The Invite, and he does it with style, adding a piece to the current debate and stressing again and again how much we need films that investigate complexity instead of avoiding it at all costs.
The Invite, in theaters from September 16
On September 16, at the cinema with I Wonder Pictures, get ready to ask yourself some questions, but also to laugh, to feel embarrassed, to appreciate and admire not only the writing of this film (very tight) and its direction, which is like an interpretive dance that passes from one character to another, and that picks up speed as things rush, but also its sincerity a little over the top, so clear as to be refreshing. And that, in the end, Angela and Joe decide to break up or not doesn't matter and that's not even the point. Because true love (in the sense of real) is not a matter of ships and fandom, but of everyday choices. Even the difficult ones.
