It was only my second Martone.
The first, Capri-Revolution, left a strange impression on me, as interesting and particular in many ways as it was so full of things that it gave me the impression of not being able to keep them all together.
Well, Nostalgia no, Nostalgia is a film that I loved completely and that I would be able to change very little about.
Felice is a handsome 55 year old (the usually spectacular Favino whose smiles and eyes always captivate me, damn his) who we see returning to Naples by plane.
We then discover that he has been living in Cairo for 40 years, having fled his hometown following an episode that only comes to light halfway through the film.
In Naples there 'is still his very elderly mother.
And many, many memories.
Among them that of his best friend, more than a brother, a friend who has now taken a very different path from his.< br />Felice wants to meet him, at all costs.
Martone tells (once again, as in his entire career) his Naples and that alone would be enough to make the film great.
We are in the Rione Sanità, one of the most popular and degraded neighborhoods of the city (despite the fact that they told me how, in reality, this district was born as a bourgeois and noble centre).
It is an "old" Naples, beautiful, made of alleys, markets, murals.
Especially in the first few minutes of the film Martone exploits his character to wander around these alleys and among these people (curious how Felice, probably only for his clothing, is immediately taken like someone "from the outside", for example seeing the waiter who asks him questions in English) immediately placing the viewer in a context as fascinating as it is "nervous" and "tight", a context in which the character of Felice seems continually out of place.
In reality Felice, and this is such an important aspect of the film that it almost draws a theme out of it, feels completely at ease.
His happiness and emotion in being dropped back in (without that he had never returned before) in his hometown are so strong as to hide everything else.
And this will be the almost moving mood of the entire film, that of a 55-year-old who, as soon as he sets foot in Naples, the 15 year old at the time returns.
And everything is beautiful for him, and everything is "easy", and everything can be solved with a smile.
In reality everything is different now, Felice finds himself entangled in a criminal story, everyone tries to tell him to leave (a bit like Capuano to the young Sorrentino in It Was the Hand of God, a film that came to mind several times here) but he absolutely doesn't realize what is happening, as if he were rejecting adult life (or at least rejecting the adult self he now has in Naples).
He has fallen back into his memories, he has not lived those 40 years in Rione Sanità.
And the biggest mistake great thing that will do is to think that time has stopped, that what we once were is also now.
Nostalgia has great merit, that is, to tell a beautiful story (it is no coincidence that it is a novel).
A 55 year old who returns to Naples after 40 years (there is a treatment on Favino's language which I will return to), a mother to find and look after , a terrible memory that slowly comes back, the parallel life of a friend now opposite to you.
It is the exaltation of those simple but perfect folk tales, with a small plot, tales that are at the same time ordinary but with those 2/3 aspects that make them extraordinary (like any of our lives, if only we have the eye and the ability to grasp them).
And then great actors, and then a great atmosphere, and then a Naples that is more I see the more I love it.
I talked about atmosphere because this film, which for large stretches seems like a cross between a soft drama and a melancholic one, then becomes a thriller of the highest level.
A thriller that has the ability to create tension more by removing rather than adding.
In fact, things happen, true, but above all Nostalgia is fantastic for how it manages to create a very tense climate (for the whole film I was there telling myself "shit, something very serious is about to happen, it will end very badly") that never abandons you again, even in the most relaxing scenes (I'm thinking for example of the beautiful sequence of the parish priest's boys dancing to the rhythm of an Arab rap piece - so similar to the Neapolitan... - sequence in which I was with my heart in my mouth the whole time thinking something bad would happen).
Martone is very good at telling us this situation of "eyes everywhere" of eyes that see everything, of pretending serenity.
However, there are also extraordinary thrillers in which the climate of tension is entirely yours, that of the spectator, in which you feel more tense for yourself than for the protagonists.
Here instead, thanks to a character as good, naive and out of the world (or at least that world to which he has returned) as that of Felice creates an unusual and beautiful empathy.
And knowing how to make your characters love is always something great in a direction.
Martone has the ability to tell everything without ever being didactic and rhetorical.
Poverty, degradation, crime, the courage of those who contrasts, the virtuous places (like the parish of that young and magnificent priest, symbol of many figures like him who actually exist), in Nostalgia we find everything you can look for in a neighborhood like that. Yet Martone doesn't put himself on a pedestal, he doesn't judge, he doesn't create key scenes, he doesn't take sides.
He limits himself to talking about men.
And so Nostalgia never becomes a fresco film or, if it does, , it's because the viewer, stimulated by the small figures in the painting, then imagines the fresco himself.
There is, obviously, great melancholy even if even in this aspect one never falls into the overall view and collective of: "look how good it used to be" but, indeed, we reserve all these melancholy aspects to the figure of Felice.
And then, melancholy...
It is no coincidence that the film is called Nostalgia and not Melancholy, because more than a sad look towards the past there is , simply, the great desire to relive that past, there are heart-shaped eyes as we recall it.
Happy is not an old man who thinks back to the past and becomes sad, on the contrary, he is a middle-aged man exhilarated by finding himself in the places of that past and, for this reason, eager to open his mind and welcome them with full lungs.
Martone more than once shows us beautiful flashbacks, often in alternating editing in the present of the same places , and this is the predominant sensation, that of reclaiming those times, those emotions, those moments.
The motorbike scene is truly a pearl in this.
And it is no coincidence that more memories lives Happy, the more he decides to want to stay there, the more he understands that only there can he really be... Happy.
All this is possible because he, for 40 years, has never returned.
The situation is different history for those who have instead lived all those years in those places, for those who have grown old there, for those who have experienced every minute of change, for those who can really realize how it was once and how it is now.
Felice, on the other hand, is a madeleine made into a man, he is a memory reified in flesh and blood.
In addition to the figure of the priest (played by the excellent Francesco di Leva, who I already greatly appreciated in the remarkable Una Vita Tranquilla), an almost Ciceronian figure for Felice in how he manages to tell him - both in the places, in the souls and in the climate - the Rione Sanità of today, there are undoubtedly two of the most important and beautiful characters in the film, the two linked to Felice for blood, even if blood of a different nature (and the difference is all there...).
I'm talking about the mother, a splendid Aurora Quattrocchi (whom I still have in my eyes in those impressive last minutes of It's been the son) and his childhood friend - now boss - Oreste (Tommaso Ragno, magnetic).
The scenes with the first are very sweet.
The one in which he washes her, completely naked, in the tub, it probably remains the most unforgettable scene of the film, perhaps because it is so alien in a cinema that always tends not to show us this type of sequence (what courage and sensitivity Quattrocchi had in having accepted).< br />It's true, it tells of something said over and over again, something that is part of all of us, the famous concept according to which the children of the past, cared for in every way by their parents, will one day be their fathers, those who will have to look after them in old age.
It is something beautiful and tragic at the same time, no more and no less than one of the symbolic images of one of the possible meanings of our existences.
But in Nostalgia it is so well told , so "simple", so natural, that something even more beautiful comes out of it.
It's that whatever Felice does he seems disconnected from society, from conventions, from roles.
Every thought of his and every his actions are natural, "obvious", in the most beautiful sense of the term.
And it is the mood that will also lead him to want to meet Oreste again at all costs, his "brother" of the past, although he is perfectly aware that there are absolutely no ideal conditions for doing so (indeed, Felice has before his eyes, but seems not to care, a thousand signs to understand that he must stay away from him, see the burnt motorbike or the threat on the wall of the house).
The Their meeting is a pearl.
This boss, who we imagine to be full of money, in reality has always lived like a mouse. In degradation, in filth, in sexual promiscuity, hidden.
His was a non-life, like a fugitive.
40 years are too many not to think that things have changed and two magnificent summers spent together at 14 and 15 years old they cannot be the bond of a lifetime.
Yet Felice - who as I have said several times upon returning to Naples is as if he had erased 40 years of oblivion - does not understand this.
And 'a tense encounter, between a man who has had a terrible life and has chosen a terrible path (a slimy but also empathetic character, to be understood) and someone in a suit and tie who, in addition to that tragedy of the past, has never gotten dirty again .
The two throw things at each other, they scream (and here too Felice shows that he doesn't understand who Oreste has become, he treats him like a normal person who thinks he's very attached to him), they get emotional.
And then they forgiveness, as it should be.
I found it wonderful how in this very heated dialogue Felice speaks several times in strict Neapolitan. But it is the arrival point of a journey begun and carried forward throughout the entire film, that of a slow re-appropriation of the Neapolitan dialect which is not just a factual question (obviously the more time you spend in a place the more you learn (or re-learn) the language) but highly symbolic.
Happy is becoming more and more the 15-year-old he once was, Naples is more and more inside him, it's like a very slow transformation, a return to his true self.
Let's also think about the dinner in the small family (where Felice, once again, proves to be naive like few others, incapable of understanding the general situation) where, at a certain point, we also see him drinking a glass of red, he who - for the new religion - has become Muslim - he could no longer do it.
A few weeks in Naples and all the Happy Egyptian is already completely lost, even if he spent 40 years there.
Slowly but inexorably we are approaching the end.
Inexorably, already.
Because the feeling has always been that, even though I hoped throughout the film that what I was sure would happen would not happen.
First we other exciting scenes, such as the underground Naples in which Felice, in the face of an Arab Madonna, sees that of his wife again.
Like the fists to the punching bag, the first real moment where we understand that that character who doesn't seem to realize anything, perhaps, has a crazy tension inside.
But the end, with an initially diegetic soundtrack (beautiful) which then envelops the final scenes, it is simply the end to which a story like this had to lead.
And yet it kills you inside.
And yet it hurts so much.
A cold-blooded murder, coward.
A wallet taken from which money is stolen.
A photo that has no effect.
For Felice, time had stopped 40 years earlier, Oreste was his brother.
But Oreste has lived there for 40 years without ever seeing him again and Felice is no longer anything to him, on the contrary, he is the image of a hateful man who had everything while he lived like a mouse.
In this ruthless and terrible different vision of Nostalgia ends things.
With a man anchored to the affections of the past and who believes that they had crystallized, were immortal, stronger than everything.
On the other hand, a finite and desperate man.< br />So those affections are worth less than a human life and 200 euros.
The first, Capri-Revolution, left a strange impression on me, as interesting and particular in many ways as it was so full of things that it gave me the impression of not being able to keep them all together.
Well, Nostalgia no, Nostalgia is a film that I loved completely and that I would be able to change very little about.
Felice is a handsome 55 year old (the usually spectacular Favino whose smiles and eyes always captivate me, damn his) who we see returning to Naples by plane.
We then discover that he has been living in Cairo for 40 years, having fled his hometown following an episode that only comes to light halfway through the film.
In Naples there 'is still his very elderly mother.
And many, many memories.
Among them that of his best friend, more than a brother, a friend who has now taken a very different path from his.< br />Felice wants to meet him, at all costs.
Martone tells (once again, as in his entire career) his Naples and that alone would be enough to make the film great.
We are in the Rione Sanità, one of the most popular and degraded neighborhoods of the city (despite the fact that they told me how, in reality, this district was born as a bourgeois and noble centre).
It is an "old" Naples, beautiful, made of alleys, markets, murals.
Especially in the first few minutes of the film Martone exploits his character to wander around these alleys and among these people (curious how Felice, probably only for his clothing, is immediately taken like someone "from the outside", for example seeing the waiter who asks him questions in English) immediately placing the viewer in a context as fascinating as it is "nervous" and "tight", a context in which the character of Felice seems continually out of place.
In reality Felice, and this is such an important aspect of the film that it almost draws a theme out of it, feels completely at ease.
His happiness and emotion in being dropped back in (without that he had never returned before) in his hometown are so strong as to hide everything else.
And this will be the almost moving mood of the entire film, that of a 55-year-old who, as soon as he sets foot in Naples, the 15 year old at the time returns.
And everything is beautiful for him, and everything is "easy", and everything can be solved with a smile.
In reality everything is different now, Felice finds himself entangled in a criminal story, everyone tries to tell him to leave (a bit like Capuano to the young Sorrentino in It Was the Hand of God, a film that came to mind several times here) but he absolutely doesn't realize what is happening, as if he were rejecting adult life (or at least rejecting the adult self he now has in Naples).
He has fallen back into his memories, he has not lived those 40 years in Rione Sanità.
And the biggest mistake great thing that will do is to think that time has stopped, that what we once were is also now.
Nostalgia has great merit, that is, to tell a beautiful story (it is no coincidence that it is a novel).
A 55 year old who returns to Naples after 40 years (there is a treatment on Favino's language which I will return to), a mother to find and look after , a terrible memory that slowly comes back, the parallel life of a friend now opposite to you.
It is the exaltation of those simple but perfect folk tales, with a small plot, tales that are at the same time ordinary but with those 2/3 aspects that make them extraordinary (like any of our lives, if only we have the eye and the ability to grasp them).
And then great actors, and then a great atmosphere, and then a Naples that is more I see the more I love it.
I talked about atmosphere because this film, which for large stretches seems like a cross between a soft drama and a melancholic one, then becomes a thriller of the highest level.
A thriller that has the ability to create tension more by removing rather than adding.
In fact, things happen, true, but above all Nostalgia is fantastic for how it manages to create a very tense climate (for the whole film I was there telling myself "shit, something very serious is about to happen, it will end very badly") that never abandons you again, even in the most relaxing scenes (I'm thinking for example of the beautiful sequence of the parish priest's boys dancing to the rhythm of an Arab rap piece - so similar to the Neapolitan... - sequence in which I was with my heart in my mouth the whole time thinking something bad would happen).
Martone is very good at telling us this situation of "eyes everywhere" of eyes that see everything, of pretending serenity.
However, there are also extraordinary thrillers in which the climate of tension is entirely yours, that of the spectator, in which you feel more tense for yourself than for the protagonists.
Here instead, thanks to a character as good, naive and out of the world (or at least that world to which he has returned) as that of Felice creates an unusual and beautiful empathy.
And knowing how to make your characters love is always something great in a direction.
Martone has the ability to tell everything without ever being didactic and rhetorical.
Poverty, degradation, crime, the courage of those who contrasts, the virtuous places (like the parish of that young and magnificent priest, symbol of many figures like him who actually exist), in Nostalgia we find everything you can look for in a neighborhood like that. Yet Martone doesn't put himself on a pedestal, he doesn't judge, he doesn't create key scenes, he doesn't take sides.
He limits himself to talking about men.
And so Nostalgia never becomes a fresco film or, if it does, , it's because the viewer, stimulated by the small figures in the painting, then imagines the fresco himself.
There is, obviously, great melancholy even if even in this aspect one never falls into the overall view and collective of: "look how good it used to be" but, indeed, we reserve all these melancholy aspects to the figure of Felice.
And then, melancholy...
It is no coincidence that the film is called Nostalgia and not Melancholy, because more than a sad look towards the past there is , simply, the great desire to relive that past, there are heart-shaped eyes as we recall it.
Happy is not an old man who thinks back to the past and becomes sad, on the contrary, he is a middle-aged man exhilarated by finding himself in the places of that past and, for this reason, eager to open his mind and welcome them with full lungs.
Martone more than once shows us beautiful flashbacks, often in alternating editing in the present of the same places , and this is the predominant sensation, that of reclaiming those times, those emotions, those moments.
The motorbike scene is truly a pearl in this.
And it is no coincidence that more memories lives Happy, the more he decides to want to stay there, the more he understands that only there can he really be... Happy.
All this is possible because he, for 40 years, has never returned.
The situation is different history for those who have instead lived all those years in those places, for those who have grown old there, for those who have experienced every minute of change, for those who can really realize how it was once and how it is now.
Felice, on the other hand, is a madeleine made into a man, he is a memory reified in flesh and blood.
In addition to the figure of the priest (played by the excellent Francesco di Leva, who I already greatly appreciated in the remarkable Una Vita Tranquilla), an almost Ciceronian figure for Felice in how he manages to tell him - both in the places, in the souls and in the climate - the Rione Sanità of today, there are undoubtedly two of the most important and beautiful characters in the film, the two linked to Felice for blood, even if blood of a different nature (and the difference is all there...).
I'm talking about the mother, a splendid Aurora Quattrocchi (whom I still have in my eyes in those impressive last minutes of It's been the son) and his childhood friend - now boss - Oreste (Tommaso Ragno, magnetic).
The scenes with the first are very sweet.
The one in which he washes her, completely naked, in the tub, it probably remains the most unforgettable scene of the film, perhaps because it is so alien in a cinema that always tends not to show us this type of sequence (what courage and sensitivity Quattrocchi had in having accepted).< br />It's true, it tells of something said over and over again, something that is part of all of us, the famous concept according to which the children of the past, cared for in every way by their parents, will one day be their fathers, those who will have to look after them in old age.
It is something beautiful and tragic at the same time, no more and no less than one of the symbolic images of one of the possible meanings of our existences.
But in Nostalgia it is so well told , so "simple", so natural, that something even more beautiful comes out of it.
It's that whatever Felice does he seems disconnected from society, from conventions, from roles.
Every thought of his and every his actions are natural, "obvious", in the most beautiful sense of the term.
And it is the mood that will also lead him to want to meet Oreste again at all costs, his "brother" of the past, although he is perfectly aware that there are absolutely no ideal conditions for doing so (indeed, Felice has before his eyes, but seems not to care, a thousand signs to understand that he must stay away from him, see the burnt motorbike or the threat on the wall of the house).
The Their meeting is a pearl.
This boss, who we imagine to be full of money, in reality has always lived like a mouse. In degradation, in filth, in sexual promiscuity, hidden.
His was a non-life, like a fugitive.
40 years are too many not to think that things have changed and two magnificent summers spent together at 14 and 15 years old they cannot be the bond of a lifetime.
Yet Felice - who as I have said several times upon returning to Naples is as if he had erased 40 years of oblivion - does not understand this.
And 'a tense encounter, between a man who has had a terrible life and has chosen a terrible path (a slimy but also empathetic character, to be understood) and someone in a suit and tie who, in addition to that tragedy of the past, has never gotten dirty again .
The two throw things at each other, they scream (and here too Felice shows that he doesn't understand who Oreste has become, he treats him like a normal person who thinks he's very attached to him), they get emotional.
And then they forgiveness, as it should be.
I found it wonderful how in this very heated dialogue Felice speaks several times in strict Neapolitan. But it is the arrival point of a journey begun and carried forward throughout the entire film, that of a slow re-appropriation of the Neapolitan dialect which is not just a factual question (obviously the more time you spend in a place the more you learn (or re-learn) the language) but highly symbolic.
Happy is becoming more and more the 15-year-old he once was, Naples is more and more inside him, it's like a very slow transformation, a return to his true self.
Let's also think about the dinner in the small family (where Felice, once again, proves to be naive like few others, incapable of understanding the general situation) where, at a certain point, we also see him drinking a glass of red, he who - for the new religion - has become Muslim - he could no longer do it.
A few weeks in Naples and all the Happy Egyptian is already completely lost, even if he spent 40 years there.
Slowly but inexorably we are approaching the end.
Inexorably, already.
Because the feeling has always been that, even though I hoped throughout the film that what I was sure would happen would not happen.
First we other exciting scenes, such as the underground Naples in which Felice, in the face of an Arab Madonna, sees that of his wife again.
Like the fists to the punching bag, the first real moment where we understand that that character who doesn't seem to realize anything, perhaps, has a crazy tension inside.
But the end, with an initially diegetic soundtrack (beautiful) which then envelops the final scenes, it is simply the end to which a story like this had to lead.
And yet it kills you inside.
And yet it hurts so much.
A cold-blooded murder, coward.
A wallet taken from which money is stolen.
A photo that has no effect.
For Felice, time had stopped 40 years earlier, Oreste was his brother.
But Oreste has lived there for 40 years without ever seeing him again and Felice is no longer anything to him, on the contrary, he is the image of a hateful man who had everything while he lived like a mouse.
In this ruthless and terrible different vision of Nostalgia ends things.
With a man anchored to the affections of the past and who believes that they had crystallized, were immortal, stronger than everything.
On the other hand, a finite and desperate man.< br />So those affections are worth less than a human life and 200 euros.
