Brotherly Love and 'Love's Brother'

Brian McFarlane reviews Jan Sardi's 'Love's Brother' (2003), a love story that focuses on Italian immigrants in Australia in the 1950s. 'What Sardi seems to be recreating is a fifties of the mind, not a documentary, just as the idea(l) of Italy and laughing, happy Italians has less to do with the reality than with a strings-accentuated place to leave and to long for. When it comes to sentimentalizing Italy and Italians, 'Love's Brother' is not, I'm happy to say, in the same class as the slushy 'Under the Tuscan Sun', but there is something about the notion of Italy let loose among other cultures that undermines rigour and serious passion equally.'