Token Smokin' Hottie: Riccardo Scamarcio

I KNOW that Italian men cannot possibly be as universally hot as the world of cinema would have me believe.

And yet if they all looked like Riccardo Scamarcio I'd be on a plane right now.

The problem with Scamarcio is that he doesn't look like he's all that in a still photo: he's one of those token smokin' hotties who really has to be seen on the screen to be appreciated. I came up against him in the film Loose Cannons* last night. It was a pretty so-so film made less endurable by the fact that I was sitting with the world's most annoying people on either side of me (on the left: two shrieking nutbars, on the right: the world's loudest and most disgusting popcorn eater ever. Plus there was a guy behind me who kept scratching himself for a good 5 minutes at a time. Weird. ).

And yet, although the film was not that great and in spite of the fact that it also featured the sublime Giorgio Marchesi I could not take my eyes off Scamarcio. He has - to steal an expression from my friend Nick - gravitas. In spades. It's not just the way he moves, although there is something there: it's his face. He has one of those faces you feel you could just look at for hours and hours. Not everyone has a face like that: James Franco, who is one of the most attractive people I can think of, does not. Benicio Del Toro, who isn't conventionally all that great, does. Orlando Bloom - again in theory very pretty - doesn't. Marlon Brandon did.

Scamarcio also, bizarely, has the ability to look about 16-years-old at one moment and 35 in the next. That might sound like an insult but given that he is 31 in real life I mean it as a compliment. There were moments in the film when he was romping around in bathers that I thought 'how YOUNG is this kid?' and then other moments when he was squinting into the sun, all linen shirt and pressed trousers, when I thought I'd got him wrong entirely.

Either way, I'm glad he's not 16 because a)that would make me feel a bit weird writing this because fancying a teenager seems a bit wring; and b)he's not at risk of growing out of his teenage beauty into a pudgy, bloaty 20-something. Stay gold Scamarcio, stay gold...



* As an off-topic aside I would like to express my frustration at the fact that this uneven Italian movie (starts well but goes nowhere fast) rates higher than two of my favourite films: Ladyhawke and Fletch, according to the Internet Movie Database. This is pro-European snobbery of the worst kind.