A long and evocative bird’s eye view of a gloomy and sinister Milan. The camera that lingers on the central station, then getting lost in the adjacent streets until it accompanies us within the walls of a small but crowded apartment. Here we witness the final preparations for the retirement party of Franco Amore, a policeman who is about to conclude his 35 years of honorable service, always on the side of the rules and far from transgression. A disciplined and dutiful anti-hero, who just a few meters from the retirement finish line finds himself entangled in a murky web of underworld, frivolity and bad luck. This is the dazzling incipit de The Last Night of Lovethird film by Andrew DiStefano available from March 9 in Italian cinemas thanks to Vision Distribution.
A cinema to be defended and valued, which draws on the glorious tradition of Italian crime fiction to give life to a tense and distressing urban polar, strengthened by the excellent interpretations of Pierfrancesco Favino and of the surprising Linda Caridi, in the role of the protagonist’s wife Viviana. The umpteenth proof of the fact that the way to make Italian cinema great again passes through the genre and directors capable of exploring it like Andrea Di Stefano, who after excursions abroad for Escobar e The Informer – Three seconds to survive it shows that it can do excellent things even in the asphyxiated Italian production landscape.
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Love’s Last Night: a surprising Italian detective story in a sinister nocturnal Milan
Remain faithful to professional and human ethics or give in to a small detour? Indulge his balanced nature, so strong as to prevent him from firing a fatal shot for his entire career, or surrender to the use of force, even at the cost of taking justice into his own hands? And when everything falls apart, what can you hold on to if the origin of the danger is Cosimo Forcella, shady and fraudulent cousin of his beloved wife? These are the questions that cross Franco Amore’s mind on the journey that accompanies him to the last night of his career, the longest and most dangerous one.
The slow descent into hell of the protagonist is framed by a dark and twilight Milan, which relives the glories of the legendary trilogy of the milieu of Fernando DiLeo (Milan caliber 9, The bad order e The boss) but with our feet firmly planted in our present complex, in which globalization also has consequences for organized crime. A present in which the well-established dynamics of Italian criminality (represented by Cosimo Forcella himself and an ever better Antonio Gerardi) meet the new powerful Chinese underworld and its ruthless but coherent codes.
The flashbacks are varied and punchy, but the core of The Last Night of Love is enclosed precisely in a single night, a crossroads of destinies and stories far more frightening and bloody than those of Out of hourswith love (in this case with a lowercase a) as the only foothold.
Love’s Last Night: a noir-tinged thriller with an international flavor
Andrea Di Stefano directs a fast-paced crime thriller with palpable tension, which despite thriving in a specific place like Milan, with its narrow streets and always busy highways, shows clear international ambitions, corroborated by the presentation in the Berlinale Special Gala section of the Berlin Film Festival 2023. After years of “I thought worse”, crumpled sufficiencies and ill-concealed inferiority complexes, finally our cinema produces a work that can compete head-on with the qualitative level of homologous European and American productions, further raising the bar already raised by My name is revengefilm Netflix tue Cosimo Gomez con Alessandro Gassmann become a real international success.
Merit of a dry and precise direction, which puts both the precious techniques and the evocative locations of the Milanese city at the service of the story (the initial sequence shot and the shots of the Milan Cathedral during the final act are an anthology), and of the screenplay of the Andrea Di Stefano himself, capable of reworking the topoi of crime cinema in a fresh and original work, which we hope will be a starting point for a new continuous exploration of polar by Italian cinema.
The last night of Love: the excellent performances of Pierfrancesco Favino and Linda Caridi
A mention is due for the pressing soundtrack by Holy Pulvirentswhich accompanies the increasingly agitated and troubled action and at the same time pays homage to the sounds with which Luis Bacalova it helped to make our cinema bis immortal. While Pierfrancesco Favino gives further display of his intensity and versatility, embracing the genre to give life to a complex and stratified character, faithful to his principles but at the same time attracted by the possibility of a lucrative second working life, what remains most impressed is the already mentioned Linda Caridi, who outlines a woman perfectly poised between the role of femme fatale, that of companion in (mis)adventures and that of the only and imperishable lifeline for a man at the total mercy of events.
The proverbial icing on the cake of a project that makes realism its stylistic code, succeeding in the difficult attempt of disguising even the most slippery forcings in the plot and in the choices of the characters in the eyes of the spectator. A plot in which disillusionment and false hope coexist, loyalty and the danger of a less flashy power but ready to extend its tentacles to every street corner, in an anonymous lay-by and even in a cold, filthy and dark drainage ditch.
Death and rebirth
Between the folds of the visceral and painful interpretation of Pierfrancesco Favino, and in that of the opposite sign of the protagonist’s colleague played by Francis DiLeva, the unease of the police force also emerges, often outraged by the professional deformations of some of its members, but made up for the most part of serious and balanced people, forced to live with danger and with the temptations of easy extra-work earnings, for one salary at best just acceptable. Franco Amore’s last night is thus transformed into an extreme and cinematically satisfying version of the daily life of many state servants, for whom even the most carefree and easy “yes” can turn into the first step of an unstoppable descent into abyss.
Let’s keep close to Pierfrancesco Favino’s gaze full of despair and regret, Andrea Di Stefano’s ability to cross and cause genres to explode and human and painful films such as The Last Night of Loverare shoots of a great cinema that all together we can revive.
