Mario Martone’s day has arrived at the Cannes Film Festival: «Nostalgia» marks the return of the Neapolitan director a few months after the excellent «Qui rido io», presented in competition at the last Venice Film Festival.
After Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who however signed a purely French film with «Les amandiers», Mario Martone is the second and last Italian director in contention this year for the Palme d’Or. The protagonist of «Nostalgia» is Pierfrancesco Favino, who plays the role of Felice, a man who returns to Naples after forty years of absence.
The man, who returned from abroad after so long to see his mother, will stay in the neighborhood where he was born (the Rione Sanità) longer than he had foreseen, rediscovering the places of his youth and coming to terms with a past that It devours it. Taken from the homonymous and touching novel by Ermanno Rea, «Nostalgia» is a film that compares the past and the present, through a different stylistic choice with which Martone underlines the passages relating to the protagonist’s adolescence. , however, it is also the one between him and Oreste, a childhood friend, with whom he committed some small crime, until a man died. Now that he is back in the district, Felice would like to see his old friend again, but Oreste, now known as the delinquent of the neighborhood, has never strayed from that world, which seems to have totally absorbed him.
A film capable of moving
It is perhaps not one of the most important works of a great director like Martone, due to some too didactic and somewhat scholastic passages in the central part, but “Nostalgia” confirms the excellent hand of an author who is always able to keep his reins of his films and to better manage all the details of the staging. Especially in the first part, inherent to the relationship found between the protagonist and the elderly mother, the emotional involvement is very high: Martone never falls into the traps of rhetoric and with a delicate touch he builds some really noteworthy sequences.
A final mention goes to the umpteenth, excellent performance of Favino in a very complicated role not only to give face to the inner torments of the character, but also for an accent – that of an Italian who has moved to Egypt for so long – all. other than trivial to make. He could be among the candidates on La Palma for best actor.