You’d figure that the country that gave the world opera would also be the most adept at fashioning soap operas, and The Best of Youth, the six-hour miniseries that appeared on Italian TV in 2003 and was released by the Weinsteins in American theaters two years later, proves that’s the case. As you’d expect of a good soap opera (or indeed any good TV serial) it’s compulsively watchable, but it’s also elegiac and authentic, which are words you wouldn’t think to associate with a soap opera, except perhaps, if you were feeling generous, some of the ones HBO has been manufacturing in recent years. Unfortunately, as you’d also expect from a good soap opera, it’s completely ridiculous, and more so as it progresses through its four-decade sweep, its intertwined threads becoming increasingly tangled, and consequently more maudlin and absurd, culminating with an ultra-cheesy ending that you know is coming for at least 90 minutes. It was probably a mistake to expect anything more, but all the fawning, hyperbolic press I read when it came out had me thinking it would be something truly transcendent and extraordinary, so I wasn’t entirely prepared for the all the textbook star-crossed lovers or the cornucopia of rainbows over Rome. Within its genre, The Best of Youth is certainly one of the most successful soap operas ever made, but ultimately that’s all it is—a very effective piece of genre filmmaking.