NOTES OF LOVE

Director's Statement

The idea for NOTES OF LOVE came from listening to other people talking about love! After the screening of La Seconda Volta two years ago at the Cannes Film Festival I hesitated a while. I wanted to make a film about the war in Yugoslavia, I even had quite a long story prepared. But how can an Italian make a film on that subject? lt seemed too difficult and pretentious to me. Then, constantly travelling between Paris and Rome, seeing Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who had a part in La Seconda Volta, meeting her women friends, I started hearing lots of love stories. And that tiny mystery of life - how to meet the ideal lover, how to recognise him or her - started to intrigue me.
Especially from the female point of view: the irrationality of identifying, even individualising, the ideal man. There were certain phrases that kept on being repeated: "I always thought and imagined he'd be like that, and that's how it was", or "I recognised him, he's the one, that's the way he is". This sort of certainty, basically rather funny, of recognising the Ioved one, often on the grounds of past and arbitrary criteria. Listening to all these stories it seemed to me that in the face of love warnen were more desperate, more serious and more amusing than men. There, I listened to the film before writing it.