Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Laura Pausini: Pleasure to Meet You’ on Prime Video, An Autobiographical Sketch Of The Singer That Also Imagines What Might Have Been

Superstar Italian singer Laura Pausini explores her life with memoir and dramatic flair in Pleasure to Meet You (Prime Video), a creative response to her pandemic downtime that blends footage of her in performance and in her private life with segments that imagine where her life might have led if she wasn’t “The Queen Of Italian Pop” with over 70 million records sold.

LAURA PAUSINI: PLEASURE TO MEET YOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In 1993, Laura Pausini won the Sanremo Music Festival, and never looked back. Sanremo is the wildly popular song contest held annually in the coastal Italian city. It’s the inspiration for Eurovision, and victories there have launched the careers of everyone from Andrea Bocelli to Maneskin. Pausini, who grew up singing in bars and at festivals with her musician father, was just 18 when her performance of the ballad “La Solitudine” secured her victory and rocketed her to fame across Europe and Latin America. Three decades, 14 albums, a Grammy award, at least five world tours later, the singer found herself with an unexpected gap in her busy schedule. It was February 2020, measures against COVID-19 had stopped everything, including music, and Pausini had some time for consideration. “A 30-year career, so many incredible experiences,” she says in voiceover. “To this day, I wake up and wonder, ‘Why me?’ What would my life have been without the win at Sanremo?”

Pleasure to Meet You attempts to answer that question. Partly, it’s a conventional video scrapbook of her career. One minute, she’s a proud, bashful kid, unsure of what to do with her Sanremo victory; the next, she’s rising out of a stage before a packed stadium to sing her 2006 hit “Lo Canto.” (“It may seem strange,” Pausini says in voiceover,” but I didn’t go to Sanremo to become famous. For me, it was already rock and roll to play piano bars with my dad.”) She’s also found at home in Rome, where she lives with her longtime partner and music director Paolo Carta and their adorable eight-year-old daughter Paola, looking back on some of her biggest concert tours and other performances and workshopping material for her next studio album.

While its autobiographical elements are pretty conventional, Pleasure to Meet You also probes Pausini’s big question about her life’s direction with a series of segments that are realized as a kind of alternate timeline vision board. Pausini portrays a version of herself who never won at Sanremo, and instead went on to live a “normal” life. She had a son, Marcello. She realized her dream of owning and operating a pottery studio. And most evenings she sings at a local restaurant, accompanied by a pianist. Pleasure alternates between these segments and the activities of the real life Laura as she considers in voiceover what lessons her professional success can offer her daughter.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Like so many singers and musicians, COVID did a number on Laura Pausini’s slate of scheduled 2020 performances, and it was while stuck at home that she came up with the concept for Pleasure to Meet You. A similar spark of inspiration struck Charli XCX, whose 2022 documentary Alone Together chronicles her effort to write and record a new record during quarantine downtime.

Performance Worth Watching: And the award for Best Actor goes to…Laura Pausini herself, who is warm and convincing in the movie within the movie here, where she plays an alternate timeline version of herself. This Laura also competed at Sanremo, but that’s where the stories diverge. She didn’t win the contest, and years later, as she’s raising Marcello on her own and throwing clay down at her boutique pottery studio, it’s her allyship with the women business owners of the restaurant where she sings that gives her the most pride.

Memorable Dialogue: Reflecting on an eventful year that saw her reach new professional heights but also dig deep into her soul in a COVID and Lockdown-fueled search for existential meaning, Pausini settles on a worthy teaching moment. “My biggest success of this past year has been showing my daughter that her mom both won and lost, because that’s how life is. Happiness lies in being able to love ourselves.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Watching the Sanremo footage three decades on, it’s easy to see why Italy basically adopted Laura Pausini as the nation’s favorite daughter. She’s sweet and polite, like a kid accepting an attendance award in the high school auditorium. But she’s a natural performer on stage, too, with a huge and confident singing voice that draws in the listener. Maybe it was all those weekends in the piano bar trenches, working gigs with her dad. Whatever it is, the Italians didn’t stand a chance. That mixture of star power and affability is still with the Laura Pausini of today. Her voiceover in Pleasure to Meet You has the casual air of an extended conversation, almost like a DVD commentary track that touches on the biggest moments of her life. The footage and still photos of her performing for thousands of people or posing with celebrities like Sophia Loren and Jim Carrey is balanced against a segment where she and Paolo clown burgers and fries in a limo after Pausini’s “lo si (Seen)” lost in the Best Song category at the 93rd Academy Awards. And when she visits her hometown, it’s the lasting bond with her lifelong friends and trusty labrador retriever Marlon that really stand out.

Pleasure to Meet You is also quite novel in its projection of what the singer’s life might have been. This film apparently marks Pausini’s debut as an actress. And sure, she’s riffing on herself. But she enlivens the segments with her typical verve, to the point that an origin story in this alternate Pausini universe wouldn’t be unthinkable. When the fictional Laura lights into “I’m Every Woman,” accompanied only by electric piano, it’s a fantastic moment of worlds colliding, the imagined character and the star singer’s pathways merging over the same kind of moment on which she cut her teeth all those years ago in Romagna.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Laura Pausini fans will thrill to the revealing autobiographical material here, but Pleasure to Meet You is also a showcase for some charming acting from the Italian superstar.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges