The Taviani brothers are fine directors —remember the great «Good morning, Babilonia» (1987) and recently the pseudo-documentary «Cesare deve morire», about the performance of Shakespeare's Julius Cesar play with Italian long term prisoners— but we have to assume that they are not very fluid in the art of narrating (and writing, in that case) their own stories, the cuts of the sequences are stiff, the editing is tough, plain, and also, at least in this case, the acting work of the performers are too theatrical, that makes this movie a little uncomfortable to see, as the interpreters (most of them too young, i'm afraid) were not moving in their natural environment or were not well directed... Ah, Pasolini Pasolini...! How we miss you...