Irene, the career woman at the center of A Five Star Life, spends most of her days in laps of luxury around the world. As an inspector of five-star resorts, we see Irene (Margherita Buy) jetting to Paris and Gstaad and Berlin and Morocco and China, traveling incognito and, like a spy, inventing professions when fellow guests inquire about her job. The actual answer to that question is feel bedsheets, sniff robes, inspect picture frames for dust, time the wait staff, detect biases among the crew, and check off mental demerits whenever a stray cup has been left for too long on a piece of lobby furniture. She uses all her senses at all times, sitting in nearly invisible judgment. For the future of the hotel, she’s the most important person in the room for a few days, and then she’s gone.
It’s a glamorous life, but it’s also a transient one. Wherever she is, she is both there and not there, simulating luxury while detaching herself from the experience. It’s a life that is both charmed and fraudulent, and there’s some degree of irony in the movie’s English-translated title A Five Star Life (the movie’s original Italian moniker, I Travel Alone, better conveys the character’s mindset). As we watch her go about her profession, which includes periodic voice-over narration explaining the various criteria she analyzes, we think of William Hurt in The Accidental Tourist, another fine movie about a professional traveler whose rules and regulations similarly safeguard him from genuine emotional connection. It’s hard to become grounded when you’re always up in the air.
But there’s also a double standard Irene must battle to stay so career-focused; to remain employed at her company, her “five-star life” mustn’t involve such messy distractions as a stable partner, two children and the Italian equivalent of a white picket fence — sacrifices rarely associated with men who possess a similar professional drive. This other life is represented through her sister Silvia (Fabrizia Sacchi), who dutifully and exhaustively struggles to raise two girls and keep afloat a marriage to her musician husband.
It’s also there in her continued platonic relationship with Andrea (Stefano Accorsi), an ex-flame whose new girlfriend is pregnant and who, with each passing month, she risks losing to the reality of middle-class familyhood. Eventually, she’ll meet an English academic, Kate (the great Lesley Manville) in a Berlin spa, who shakes up both Irene’s life and the movie itself.
At 85 minutes, A Five Star Life is short and feels short, but it’s anything but slight. This accomplished second feature from director Maria Sole Tognazzi — the daughter of Ugo Tognazzi and Franca Bettoia, two notable Italian thespians — is rife with observations that ring true across borders and cultures: the sense of competition among sisters, the loss of libido affecting long-married couples, the fact that Irene’s unshackled life is often held against her by those with more baggage — even the often unpredictable immediacy of death.
All of these themes dance around the glittering surface of A Five Star Life, until its gorgeous palaces of escape can no longer be just that. This is a film that quietly confronts the tenuous border between freedom and loneliness and, despite its protagonist’s eagle-eyed profession, is all the better for not judging its characters’ choices. It’s a lovely and refreshing picture on many levels.
A FIVE STAR LIFE. Director: Maria Sole Tognazzi; Cast: Margherita Buy, Fabrizia Sacchi, Stefano Accorsi, Gianmarco Tognazzi, Lesley Manville; Distributor: Music Box; Not rated; in Italian and English; now playing at the Tower Theater and O Cinema in Miami. Opens Friday at Regal Shadowood and Living Room Theaters in Boca Raton, Movies of Delray, Movies of Lake Worth and the Bill Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables.