Winterbottom: The Trip To Italy (2014)

The Trip To Italy is the follow-up to the enormously successful The Trip, which redacted a five-part BBC series that followed a lightly fictionalised Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on a fine dining tour of the Lake District. This time around, they’re in Italy, following on the heels of Byron and Shelley instead of Wordsworth and Coleridge, although there’s the same Romantic drive towards conversation as a poetic act. If anything, it’s more heightened in this film, which is positively beatific in its tribute to the second-generation Romantic poets, as Coogan and Brydon visit a whole host of sites associated with their lives, and spend at least half of their conversations quoting and contemplating them. The rest of their trip is spent on movie trivia and history, and a great deal of the film’s beauty resides in the way in which it bridges these two worlds, attaching a Romantic sense of place to film locations, or the remains of filming locations, to the point where revisiting the shooting sites of, say, Roman Holiday, or Voyage To Italy, becomes infused with the same sense of presence, the same sense of pilgrimage, as returning to the fabled sites of Romantic poetry. Just as a Romantic reader might feel as if they had only truly read “Mont Blanc” once they had visited it, so there’s a sense that Coogan and Brydon only fully see their favourite films by visiting the sites where they were filmed. And, in this film, impersonation is heightened into a kind of visitation – Coogan’s impression of, say, Bogart feels totally continuous with visiting the most spectacular backdrop for Beat The Devil; both envisage the film as something incantatory, participatory, an experience that demands to be enacted in the same way that a Romantic poem demands to be read aloud. That makes language feel extraordinarily embodied, enunciated, flavorful – eating and speaking amount to the same thing, the mouthfeel of conversation – while the few moments where language is relayed remotely tend to be unutterably melancholy, especially when Coogan and Brydon repair to their hotel rooms each night for mobile and Skype conversations. That fixation with location also elevates Winterbottom’s landscapes to an even more breathtaking pitch than The Trip - as in Genoa, one of his most beautiful films, they don’t merely recreate the Italy of the Romantics, but enliven every location with the films that might have been shot upon it, or might one day be shot upon it. That creates a considerably more open-ended film than The Trip, albeit more open to melancholy at the same time – for all that Coogan and Brydon commiserate with Byron and Shelley, it’s only to assuage a middle-aged ennui that Byron and Shelley never experienced, the peculiar agony of artists who never had the capacity or the opportunity to die too young.