Following the death of his wife in a car accident, a college professor decides to teach English Literature at a university in Genova, Italy. Joe is accompanied by his two daughters, 16-year-old Kelly and 10-year-old Mary. The trio occupies a flat in the crowded Genova streets and soon adapt to the local way of life, taking day trips to the beach and hiring an Italian tutor in musical composition. Kelly begins dating a local Italian teenager, surreptitiously making dates with him behind her father's back. Mary remains close to her father, and still deals with painful memories of her mother's death. A passenger in the car herself when her mother was killed, she was directly responsible for the accident and remains haunted by her image. Joe, while enjoying life in Genova, has to deal with the demands of being a single parent while also balancing his re-emergent love life. One romantic interest is Barbara, a colleague at the university with whom he shared a brief romantic relationship back at Harvard when both were students. Barbara tries to get close to the family, helping with translation and their day-to-day needs in Genova, but crossing the thin line between good advice and intrusion in their private ways in the process. Another romantic interest is a young Italian student in Joe's literature class. She is brash and idealistic and quickly makes her intentions known to the suddenly single professor. Matters come to a head one day when Joe makes a lunch date with the Italian student, simultaneously spurning the much older Barbara. Kelly gets into a fight with her Italian boyfriend and is forced to hitch a ride home from the beach. Meanwhile, Mary is left to walk home alone due to the lateness of her older sister and instead follows an apparition of her late mother across a busy intersection, almost getting killed and causing yet another car crash, but luckily a minor one. The movie ends with the two daughters beginning their studies at a local Italian secondary school, eager to start a new chapter as a family, having already learned a great deal about family, love, and mourning, on the colourful streets of Genova.
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Production
produced the film and suggested that it reflected Michael Winterbottom's family life in the same way that Winterbottom's ex-wife, Sabrina Broadbent, had documented their family life in her novel .
Genoa was generally well received., the film holds a 77% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 44 reviews with an average rating of 6.24/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Michael Winterbottom's tale of grief and mourning, though frustrating in places, is intelligent filmmaking with superb central performances." The film released direct to DVD in the United States in April 2011, immediately after Firth's Oscar win, under the alternate titleA Summer in Genoa.
