Feeling of deep return

Mario Martone’s “Nostalgia” is released – a film participating in the Cannes Film Festival, nominated by Italy for the “Oscar”. Starting as a discourse on memory and the volatility of the past, the film takes an unfortunate turn into crime drama territory. But the performance of the actors, especially Pierfrancesco Favino in the title role, still raises it above the standard modern Italian examples of this genre. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

Last year, at the Venice Film Festival, Paolo Sorrentino presented his most confessional film, The Hand of God, a sumptuously filmed, bittersweetly humorous, southern-Italian-tinged panegyric of Naples and his own youth spent there in the 1980s. The picture received eight awards in Venice (although not the main prize), was recognized as the best film of the year in its homeland and reached the Oscar final, where it lost to the Japanese film Get behind the wheel of my car. This year, the Italian Oscar committee selected a film by another Neapolitan native, much less known abroad, Mario Martone, whose hometown has been a source of inspiration since the 1990s. His “Nostalgia”, as the title already implies, is devoted to the same theme of eternally elusive youth, is played on the same streets and looks back at the same eighties, but this picture is much more traditional in form and much less personal in content.

The film opens with a quote from Pasolini that nostalgia is the only way to know yourself. With this maxim, one would rather argue, but it is precisely such a path – either back or forward to his real “I” – that Felice Lasco (Pierfrancesco Favino), who returns to Naples after a forty-year absence, has to make. He spent these years in the Middle East, Lebanon and Egypt, where he became a successful businessman, married a local (Sofia Essaidi), and also converted to Islam and began to forget his native language. He comes to the city of childhood, seemingly with the aim of seeing his elderly mother (Aurora Quattrocki), but in fact (although, perhaps, he himself does not yet realize this) – not only to remember his youth, but to linger in it forever. The task, of course, is doomed to failure from the start.

Once in place, Felice discovers that Naples, or rather the Sanita quarter, has changed at the same time, and not at all. His mother no longer lives in the old apartment, from the windows of which a view of Capodimonte was opened: the unscrupulous owner of the house, taking advantage of the fact that her mind and sense of reality were weakening, moved the old woman to a cramped hole in the basement. A compassionate neighbor (Luciana Zazzera) recalls the times when Signora Teresa was the best dressmaker in the quarter, and complains that now everything is not right, there is no work, everything is sewn in China, the damned communists brought the country to the bottom. The crowd on the streets became multicolored. But otherwise, everything is as before: the sun is shining, clothes are drying on clotheslines, the paint is picturesquely peeling off the walls, curious looks are watching passers-by from every window, and young people ride motorcycles and get into fights, like Felice once. True, now they have pistols in addition to their own fists.

Since this is a Neapolitan story, then, of course, nowhere without the theme of organized crime (especially since Martone already placed it in the same scenery in the film “Mayor of the Sanita District”, 2019). It gradually grows through the softly lit first half of the film as Felice touchingly takes care of her mother and remembers her 15 years (the flashbacks are shot in a manner that imitates a handheld camera and scratched 8mm film – she seems to emphasize that the memory of the hero was not true , but a film clouded with a sentimental tear with himself in the title role). Here, a gang of guys in black rushes on bikes along a quiet street, but the local parish priest Don Luigi (Francesco di Leva) delivers a sermon saturated with impotent anger right on the square: yesterday, in another skirmish, a teenager was killed again, and the police and city authorities, as usual busy with something else.

For Don Luigi, rescuing the youth of the neighborhood from what is almost their only career path, petty crime, is his personal crusade. He tries to involve Felice in it, to present him as a positive example of the fact that one can go out into the big world from the Sanita quarter and achieve success in it legally. However, this inspiring lesson is hampered by Felice’s past, the details of which begin to be revealed from the middle of the picture. And the route along familiar streets brings him closer and closer to his old friend Oreste Spasiano (Tommaso Ragno), whose occupation is easy to guess from his nickname Villain, which the inhabitants of the quarter pronounce without any irony. The boundaries of the frames that Felice scrolls in his memory are moving apart, the past is connected to the present, and it turns out that nostalgia is just self-deception, which does not help to understand oneself better at all, but only makes you repeat old mistakes, which you cannot run away from this time. .