27 maggio 2022 16:30
“Knowledge is in nostalgia. Whoever is not lost does not possess “. The words of Pier Paolo Pasolini are the prologue to the opening of the extraordinary Nostalgia by Mario Martone, now in the hall less than a year after the no less remarkable Here I laugh !.
It is a film from which one would hardly want to leave, which one already misses when one approaches the end. We do this path of knowledge together with the protagonist Felice Lasco – one of the most beautiful interpretations of the now dense career of Pierfrancesco Favino – who is basically a sentimental in the best sense of the term, animated by a true interiority. Felice returns to his Naples, just like Martone to his city-world, with eyes and soul dazzled by such sumptuous beauty. He left as a boy touring the Middle East, southern Africa; he became a building contractor and then married a doctor in Cairo and converted to Islam.
With his self-taught baggage he returned after many years to the city where he was born and carefree adolescence, where he rode on a scooter with his best friend. He finds his now fragile elderly mother with great tenderness, a single, tiny figure who will leave him shortly after. With the child’s gaze, he goes around the city full of wonder, on foot and even more on a scooter. It is a retracement of one’s steps, to remember and from this take, find, a new awareness.
At his mother’s funeral he meets an extraordinary character, a street priest, Father Luigi Rega (Francesco Di Leva, another magnificent interpretation), inspired by the real figure of Father Antonio Loffredo from the Sanità district, the one in which Martone has been involved for years. a total manner and which the priest has revolutionized with many meritorious initiatives. The director films the restaurants, the houses, their inhabitants, the markets and imbues us with them. His gaze is that of the protagonist who seems really happy – a name that enunciates the character – so much so that he doesn’t want to go back to Cairo anymore, preferring his wife to join him.
But there is a kind of original sin to be solved, to be faced. The one with the brotherly friend of adolescence, Oreste Spasiano, who in the meantime has become a terrible and ultimately desperate boss of the neighborhood. He could be called the unhappy. They were both fifteen but a terrible fact, which remained secret, perhaps divided them forever. Felice left Naples at that time.
As with Fellini, matter is the real, but the essence is dreamlike
The continuous sequences of re-exploration of the city, of the district, rise here to reappropriation of places, a synonym of rediscovered freedom, and are simply magical. But are we really in Naples? These huge rocky walls on which houses rise, these great ancient walls, give the impression of being in North Africa, in the Middle East, at times maybe even in Jerusalem. Martone with only visual language breaks, cancels physical and mental boundaries. Including those between past and present, with the magnificent sequences of Happy boy on a scooter with Oreste, and where a work of light, of the grain of the image (great photograph by Paolo Carnera), creates both difference and osmosis.
The alienating effect on the viewer is great. It is no longer known whether we are in the field of the cinema of reality, or of the cinema of the transfiguration, as it did not happen since the time of Federico Fellini, that of Roma so to speak, but without mimicking it in the least. As with Fellini, matter is the real, but the essence is dreamlike. The dream as a means of knowledge of reality and metaphysical elevation at the same time. And lightness contains gravity.
Martone, theater director, by adapting a novel by Ermanno Rea does not make a “literary” film but by overturning the concept of cinema of civil commitment, he makes pure cinema here and there was a great need for it. For the cinema short.
Another splendid story of spiritual brothers, and of brotherly expectations involuntarily betrayed, is the one told by the Belgian Lukas Dhont in Closehis second long-awaited feature film after winning the Un certain regard con section at Cannes in 2018 Girl, revelation film. If in Close non innova is because it seems here like wanting to mark an ideal continuation with Girl. See in Girl a boy was trying to change sex, in Close we are always on a ridge, the one between the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence, between friendship and fraternal feeling – contiguous to love – between two children. The border is as fragile and delicate as the feelings of human beings in formation, and their direction on such a difficult a priori issue is astonishing. However, while in the Girl a new life was flourishing, here a little boy finds himself having to look for a new meaning in life, after the tragedy, after mourning. And it goes far beyond reporting the effects of bullying.
Almost a new potential concept of family emerges from the chaos told in Brother by Hirokazu Koreeda (already winner in 2018 of the Palme d’Or with A family business). A girl abandons her newborn in special places in Japan and two employees take possession of the baby, the girl discovers them, the police secretly follow everything. Everyone has a fault and yet each reveals a transparent humanity, a light that elevates it. No one is “located” in a clear way, morally as well as familiar. After all, the director himself is away here in South Korea. However, especially in the finale, the director’s humanist gaze becomes somewhat easy, and the strength of the film decays in part.
Those who are never in fashion, and not even so much in “their” way, are Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. With Tori and Lokita, this time the two Belgian brothers attach themselves with the camera to the bodies – always with that admirable balance that distinguishes them by preventing them from being pornographic on pain, that is, on the type of cinema truth – of a black girl, Lokita, and her brother Tori, originating in Benin. We are so used to this cinema that perhaps we no longer see its depth, its uniqueness. Yet Lokita and Tori are two stupendously outlined characters, worthy of neorealist cinema, although the Dardenne cinema is notoriously a – very autonomous – filiation of that of Robert Bresson.
Tori and Lokita are literally in symbiosis. They move as one. This is their strength and allows them to face and endure the constant abuses that their sister has to suffer from the Italian head chef of a restaurant – where Lokita sings with her wonderful voice – dedicated to trafficking and exploitation, or by the boy who runs the ” Lokita’s working imprisonment, or by the loan shark who extorted them by taking away the money to be sent to their mother who, moreover, does not even believe him. All male figures are negative, and Tori in helping her sister almost seems like she wants to make up for them too.
Lokita is in desperate need of documents that allow her, among other things, to stay next to her beloved little brother who has already obtained them. And in this desperation she is willing to tie her hands and feet to an organization of shady people in order to get what she wants. To enter hell just to get out of hell to live eternally in “no man’s land”.
It is a social film, of denunciation but at the same time it is the opposite of that type of cinema. There is no rhetoric, there is no way, the film is as short as the cut of the narrative is dry and dry. After all, it is a film noir gang and Tori, the protagonist of the second part, moves like the perfect protagonist of a film noir, with stalking and tricks. With the difference that he is a child. Black in addition.
The truth and the candor of Tori and Lokita they express themselves through their actions, in a natural way, without the need for frills of a manner, but this clashes heavily with the surrounding rawness. Two opposite worlds. And it is a war between worlds that staged by the Dardenne, with all the consequences of the case.