Family Diary | Cronaca familiar | 1962 Italian drama film | Valerio Zurlini | Marcello Mastroianni

Family Diary (Italian: Cronaca familiare) is a 1962 Italian film directed by Valerio Zurlini and based on the novel by Vasco Pratolini. It tells the story of two brothers, played by Marcello Mastroianni and Jacques Perrin, who are brought up apart from each other at their mother’s death, then brought together by difficult family circumstances. Described by Elliot Stein in The Village Voice as “the classiest ’male weepie’ ever filmed“, Family Diary is an exemplary adaptation of the semi-autobiographical Vasco Pratolini novel Two Brothers, and won Zurlini a shared Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Marcello Mastroianni gives a sensitive, finely judged performance as Enrico, a struggling journalist in the Rome of 1945. He receives a phone call informing him that his younger brother Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin) has died. Enrico recalls their long and difficult relationship; he was brought up by their poor but warm-hearted grandmother (Sylvie), while Lorenzo was raised as a ge