CATERINA IN THE BIG CITY offers a novel and original approach to The Teen Genre. A timeless 'Coming of Age' tale is portrayed with truth and style, although the specifics of contemporary Italian politics lose a bit in translation, even a viewer who is ignorant of European politics is not left in the dark. Caterina (played by Alice Teghil) is a junior high school aged student who relocates to Rome with her family. Her father is a frustrated teacher who feels that his career has been sidetracked in the sleepy, coastal town of Monalto, and looks forward to the possibility of social and intellectual advancement in the big city. Soon, he runs up against the stratified nature of Italian society, and Caterina encounters the same setup, but within her school system. From her first day in class, she meets classmates who toss around political jeremiads which they don't really comprehend, but are very emotionally attached. Although, by the end of the school year, Caterina is moved and changed by her experiences, she seems to understand that these emotionally charged names and categories never tell the whole story, and really amount to passionate clichés. Paolo Virzì, the director, is known in Italy for his ability to examine the entrenched nature of Italian politics with humor and insight. CATERINA IN THE BIG CITY an intelligent look at what it is like to live in a stratified society, and to strive to locate your unique and proper place.

I found it very hard to bring up sympathy for the characters in this film. Acctualy, the only person I liked was the chauffeur, and only because he slapped one of the annoying kids. All the characters were awfully stereotyped and practically all the events were clichés. It was very easy to predict what was going to happen. The two girls that represent the two political visions are the best examples.Due to the fact that I'm Dutch and not Italian doesn't really give me the right to comment this because I'm not fully familiar with the Italian political atmosphere etc. Maybe in Italy it is that Black/White...

Caterina gives us an opportunity to feel and a chance to hope. A young girl both naive and somehow mature, she is unsure of what she wants in life. Her task is learning to navigate the waters of a high school in Rome where she is the new girl from the sticks when her father is transfered from a small town on the coast. He fulfills his dream of returning to the cultural mecca of the capital where he hopes to take his "rightful" place among the intelligentsia. But the film turns on just this point–"rightful place". There are no simple answers, though we do have an opportunity to see how complex it is to find one's place, rightful or not, in the world. Caterina is something of a metaphor for the Italian populace at large, I would think. But she is more than this. There is something about her story that touched me, several decades and half a world away from the world she inhabits, a world stratified by cliques and patronage, prejudice and injustice...a world very much like the one I live in and the one I imagine most of us live in. Caterina–as the film that bears her name–does not take the easy way out in running away or self-repression or living a life of quiet desperation, even when her sheltered provincial upbringing and less-than-ideal family situation do not give her any clues on how to deal with her new life and classmates from prominent families. She tries to adjust to the fast-pace and superficiality of life in the Italian capital, and much of the fun of the movie is seeing her in the various situations she encounters along the way. Her father is great as the frustrated writer with no talent and a loud voice, a self-important boor. My heart goes out to all the Caterinas of the world, who go forward with optimism and pure heart even when they know the odds are against them.

I saw 'Caterina va in Città' in Sydney, where the audience had mixed reactions to the schoolboy who speaks Italian with what's apparently meant to be a Sydneysider accent. In general, I was impressed by the ensemble acting, but I felt that the best performance was given by Margherita Buy as the heroine's mother Agata. I was disappointed that Agata has so little to do with the main plot of the film.The symbolism is just a trifle heavy-handed in this movie. Remember those Hollywood war movies from World War Two, in which the bomber crew conveniently had one member of every (white) ethnic group? (And there was usually one rich guy and one guy from the slums.) Well, director/co-scriptwriter Paolo Virzi has got that gimmick here, Italian style. When 15-year-old Caterina's parents move house from a Tuscan seaside town to Rome and enrol her in a big-city school, the student body conveniently includes the full spectrum of Italy's national archetypes. For example, Daniela is wealthy, beautiful and popular, the daughter of an official in the right-wing government. Margherita is a left-wing 'revolutionary', the daughter of a famous intellectual. Of course, the film implies that Margherita is somehow better and more 'authentic' than Daniela.Because I found the political subplots of this movie to be deeply clichéd -- especially since Italy is in no position to lecture any other nation on the subject of politics -- I was pleased that the film's political content stays firmly secondary. The main story of this movie is, rightly, Caterina's uneasy and awkward progress through adolescence and into adulthood. It's no surprise to discover that being a teenage girl in modern Italy is difficult, but surely every adolescent -- male, female, rich, poor, in any century or culture -- has found adolescence to be a difficult time of transition. Except for some of its political comments, I found this to be a very honest and intelligent film, with characters I really cared about. I'll rate 'Caterina va in Città' 8 out of 10, and I look forward to more films from Paolo Virzi. Brava, Caterina!