A middle-age buddy picture about five friends who have been through it all together-school, the army, the shock of maturity-and who are determined to fight middle age, together. Bolting from jobs and marriages, they embark on the collective life of Riley, becoming professional pranksters, concocting elaborate practical jokes that in their execution seem more laborious than working for a living. Their brief spasm of existential burlesque leads them smack up against their own mortality when they must bury one of their own. (This is an uncanny bit of foreshadowing in a film written and begun by Pietro Germi and completed by his friend Monicelli after Germi's death one week into the shooting.) Taken as a brittle satire, My Friends is perhaps the culmination of a male-oriented Italian comedy genre that nevertheless allows the male ego (what Elliott Stein called "latter-day vitelloni") little slack. But My Friends is a softer, funnier film than most, soft like the world-weary faces of Ugo Tognazzi and Philippe Noiret themselves.