Alto

This first paragraph is where I give a pithy, opening thought to what I thought about the movie I’m reviewing. But with Alto, I’m really drawing a blank. Alto is a flat, dull movie lacking so much originality that it’s actually sapping my ability to come up with a clever and original opener.

Alto follows a developing love story between two Italian-American women. The first is Frankie, a musician. She begins the movie with an engagement to one of those disposable, male love interests who represent the trappings of traditional heterosexuality that often appear in lesbian love stories. Frankie struggles with her Italian identity. She believes Italians are often stereotyped and should not celebrate mobsters and criminals so much within their own community. Frankie ends up finding a dead body with connections to the mob in the trunk of a car. At the guy’s funeral, Frankie meets Nicolette and they hit it off. Nicolette and Frankie slowly fall in love. They also struggle with sexuality, family issues and the fact that Nicolette is connected to the mob. In the last act, Frankie and Nicolette end up together and it’s revealed that Frankie’s dad was a member of the mob all along.

Alto’s comedy is primarily stereotype based. I assume the writer/director is Italian otherwise the way this movie depicts Italians wouldn’t be cool. But my problem with the comedy isn’t that it’s potentially offensive to Italian Americans, it’s that it’s not funny. The main punchline in the movie is that Italian Americans are basically exactly what you expect. They live up to every media stereotype. But the thing about comedy is that generally, the punchline shouldn’t be exactly what you’d expect. There needs to be something new, surprising or at least absurd to make that sort of joke land and there just isn’t. It’s just Italian characters acting like every Italian American character you’ve seen in television and film for the past 30 years.

This links into a more general problem with Alto, that there’s nothing new or fresh here. I mean yeah, there’s the lesbian love story angle I guess, but that’s not enough. I’ve seen other WLW movies assume the same thing; that having their leads be queer is enough originality that they can do an otherwise cliche movie. But queerness alone can’t save a script like Alto which is rife with cliches and incredibly overdone dialogue. Alto feels like so many movies I’ve seen before, both straight and queer. Alto suffers from an absolute dearth of originality.

The final problem with Alto is that the characters aren’t likeable. Likeable characters allows me to forgive a lot of sins. Imagine Me and You, for example is largely cliche and is just a heterosexual rom-com with a queer twist. But that movie remains one of my favourites because of how much I like the characters. However, Alto doesn’t have that safety net. The characters are at best flat and at worst annoying and unpleasant. I didn’t enjoy spending an hour and 40 minutes with these characters. I don’t root for Nicolette and Frankie as a couple because I don’t care about either of them individually.

Alto is a flat, mediocre and uninspiring movie. There’s just such a lack of originality to be found in this movie. Even many movies that I’ve given lower ratings on this site at least tried something and seemed to have some ideas. Those movies swung big and missed big. Alto, however, didn’t try to swing big. It played it safe and boring. That makes it an extremely dull sit of a movie. Don’t waste your time with Alto. There’s nothing to be found here that you couldn’t find in several other movies.

Overall rating: 3.7/10

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