This pick was made fill out my wife’s regular quota of animated films. The title in Italian translates as The Art of Happiness. Not coincidentally this is also the title of the popular book co-authored by the current Dalai Lama. That’s a pretty good hint that Buddhism figures rather heavily in the themes of this compact film.

Sergio is a taxi driver who works on the streets of Naples and in fact pretty much the entirety of this film is of him sitting in the cab and driving around. Through his reminiscences and his conversations with his passengers, we realize that he is working through his grief at the recent death of his brother. The two of them were once a semi-successful pair of musicians but Sergio’s elder brother decided to pack up and move to Tibet, presumably to study Buddhism and to meditate, and Sergio has never quite made peace with that decision. As he drives across the often rainy streets in the depths of his misery, he meets and talks to a variety of people, including a singer who is suffering grief of her own, an uncle who have known both of the brothers since they were children, and even a radio show host who seems to have a fatalistic view of society. Each of them seems to bring to him a piece of his brother with them and so he starts the healing process.

The film is similar to The Dark Side of the Heart in some ways. Both intermix reality with imagination and both draw from deep philosophical wells. This one however is more introspective and more serious. Combined with how it confines both its main character and consequently the audience inside a taxi and lacks any sense of fun, I’m sad to say that it gets rather boring. I can’t say that I find the conversations very interesting or insightful either. The film misses the opportunity to have Sergio’s brother explain to him what he gets out of Buddhism. I get that the film is trying to show rather than tell and hence uses stories like that of the wealthy old woman to illustrate the regrets of life but I’m not sure how effective it is. I do think that using the singer to give Sergio a sort of happy ending feels like a cheap ending and rather undermines the film’s depth. Probably the most interesting interlocutor was Sergio’s uncle. When Sergio asks him why he doesn’t seem to be in mourning, he explains that since he has known the two brothers he has watched them grow and change in countless ways, albeit all in ways that delight him. In effect, they have each died and been reborn again and again before his eyes with the obvious implication that death is just one more step in this cycle.

The art is good and I rather like that the film is set in Naples, with the uncollected trash lining the sides of the streets being a direct metaphor for Sergio’s mental condition. But overall the film is just not that interesting and I find it hard to recommend it to anyone.