ABSTRACT
Whereas North American cinema and television have largely focused on narratives addressing Gen Xers in their twenties, the Italian movie and TV industry have paid greater attention to a diff erent type of Gen X “growing pains,” those experienced as this cohort approached critical milestones: 30 and 40. At the beginning of the new century, two movies have successfully portrayed the restlessness and the discontent of Italian Gen Xers, once again restricting their focus almost exclusively to male characters. Directed by Gabriele Muccino in 2001, L’ultimo bacio [The Last Kiss] portrays a group of men in their late twenties paralyzed by their inability to assume grown-up responsibilities. The obsessive behaviors, the compulsive promiscuity, the betrayals, and the brusque abandonments of the four protagonists speak of a generation of males that resist the domesticity and the domestication associated with turning 30: their only loyalty is to their male cohort, with whom they share the desire to remain in a perpetual state of immaturity.2 L’ultimo bacio met with such box-offi ce success that it was soon released worldwide and was later remade in the US by Tony Goldwyn (The Last Kiss, 2006). Almost ten years later, Muccino released a sequel to the fi lm, Baciami ancora (Kiss Me Again, 2010) where its characters, now almost 40, undergo that very domestication they had once strenuously resisted.
