Eternity and a Day (the director really knew what he meant) is an art-house movie made after an infallible recipe to win critical acclaim and eventually those great prizes of the broken hearted that will never make a blockbuster. The ingredients of the recipe are quite simple: you take a famous actor that already stared in a few cult/art movies, namely Bruno Ganz and have him play after a script written by a famous screenwriter who was behind many successful art movies, namely Tonino Guerra and add the name of a famous director already acclaimed as a master on the whole thing and you have...this. First of all, I admire Bruno Ganz in his original voice (the dubbing was atrocious, I mean it is so dam obvious that they felt the need to get Ganz to make the credits sound appealing!) an actor with a wide range of possibilities who fails to work his charms on you because he is given very little to work on. This was the responsibility of T. Guerra, a name that I have come to hate because, even if I agree that La Notte was a masterpiece and L'Aventura comes pretty close, I see them mostly as the result of Antonioni's vision, and Guerra's later projects convinced me he wasn't much of a screenwriter after all. Making a script that is the basis of an elliptical, action-free, blank-metaphor-full movie such as this one is again an argument to support the idea that sparkly credits (give us the Palm d'Or!) were the only reason why his presence was solicited.<br /><br />So, the story, if any, is a combination of at least four movies that I can think of on the spot: mostly Wild Strawberries (with the lonely, aging man with an unfulfilled life who ponders about the reasons one lives and what are the best decisions in life. Also the old man appears projected as old in his memories), L'Aventura ( Guerra for starters and also the attempt of the main character to desperately give a meaning to one's life, and the metaphors associated with the sea), Death in Venice (the metaphor of the sea, the relation between an old artist and a child who inspires him to find the meaning of life and love), Eyes Wide Shut (a long shot but the children sale reminded me of that secret organization). Giving Caesar his due, taking those movie references from this one what remains is an intolerable bore with the camera lingering in a meaningless manner on ....whatever in order to fill the wide holes in the ozone-layer of the "poetic atmosphere".<br /><br />And I needed four coffee cups to finish this movie