One Man Up

One Man Up (L'uomo in più, 2001) is an Italian drama-comedy directed by Paolo Sorrentino that you can watch online on iFILM. Two men named Antonio Pisapia live separate lives in 1980s Naples — one a popular crooner, the other a professional footballer — until a sex scandal and a career-ending injury send each of them into freefall.

The film runs the two stories in loose parallel without ever forcing them to converge. Toni Servillo, who would later star in Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, plays the singer with the specific quiet desperation of a man whose public self has just evaporated. Andrea Renzi handles the footballer's side. Already in this debut feature you can see Sorrentino's signatures: long unhurried takes, a jazz-inflected rhythm in the editing, Naples doing most of the heavy lifting as atmosphere.

There is no lesson delivered and no redemption engineered. Sorrentino just watches what happens to men when the thing that defined them is gone. Stream One Man Up online on iFILM.