It's Mario Martone's day at the Cannes Film Festival in competition with Nostalgia, from the novel by Ermanno Rea, starring Pierfrancesco Favino and so a piece of Naples arrived on the Croisette.
An eighth day (with the Maneskin barricaded in the Marriott hotel waiting for the big premiere tomorrow of Elvis by Baz Luhrmann) that is historic for Cannes. In fact, the 75th festival is celebrated with a Montee des Marches that brings together many directors awarded in the past from Paolo Sorrentino to Claude Lelouche, from Guillermo del Toro to Michel Hazanavicius, Olivier Assays among others.
"Not a celebration of the past but an opportunity to look to the future" as reiterated by the general delegate Thierry Freamaux at the ceremony preceding the screening of the film out of competition The Innocent, a family drama directed by Louis Garrel, followed by a 75th anniversary gala dinner at the Marché Forville in the old town of Cannes.
Applause for the long-awaited documentary out of competition moonage daydream by Brett Morgan that electrified David Bowie fans and enthralled the entire audience. The film, after years of work with extreme care in editing and sound, is not the usual musical biopic but an immersion in the artistic journey of a unique and sole personality such as David Bowie.
For the film, the director had access to the infinite David Bowie Estate with over 5 thousand assets including videos, objects, interviews, films, a treasure chest that he used to make an author's documentary. In Nostalgia the protagonist Felice Lasco (Favino in his first Neapolitan film), returns to Naples after 40 years to see his elderly mother who he had suddenly left when he was still a boy.
In the neighborhood where he was born, Sanità, he wanders, gets lost, almost doesn't understand the language but there is something that attracts him, the memories of a distant life with Oreste (Tommaso Ragno), his childhood best friend, become a spontaneous and irrepressible reason to put down roots even though in Cairo his life as a rich entrepreneur with a beloved wife awaits him.
The neighborhood has changed, but for the worse, with a priest (Francesco Di Leva) trying to keep the boys away from the Camorra draft. In those alleys an invincible force almost forces them to stay, it is 'nostalgia'.
"I have a hard time speaking rationally about this film. – says Pierfrancesco Favino who for Nostalgia learned Arabic, then a dialect as a foreigner returning to his homeland, and finally the Neapolitan language – It was an extremely visceral experience for me. Even today, all I can say is a clumsy attempt to describe the emotions I experienced while doing it. It was a place, a space, a time where I completely lost myself, the enchanting Sanità made me discover things about myself that I hadn't brought out. It's a beautiful story of love and friendship, but I feel like my navel spoke for me.
Each of us – continues Favino to ANSA – inside himself he has a south of a world, like an internal magnet, a place that perhaps represents his most intimate self, perhaps that of his ancestors. In this sense, Sanità represents any place in the world, Naples as Cairo, as elsewhere and the fact that in elsewhere he finds himself is incredible. Returning: that gesture there becomes more important than the landing".
The literary background of Nostalgia was a driving force for Martone. “For the first time, even though I was wondering about the meaning of this story, I didn't find any answers, I relied on Ermanno Rea and his labyrinth. I got lost, deliberately.".
It was also, for the Neapolitan director, a return. "Places of cinema, places of the soul", He says. "Many things about Rea's novel fascinated me, certainly the possibility of making a film set entirely in one neighborhood, an enclave like Sanità that even the Neapolitans know little about and which was a no man's land, a Wild West for the Camorra.
I imagined it as a labyrinth, a chessboard, Borgesian forms in which characters are imagined to make a journey through the past and the present. There was in all this a cinematic form that tempted me, the idea of making a film not with a traditional staging but as a cinema of reality by throwing myself into the street as in Italian neorealism and meeting real people.".
The film, an Italian-French production, Picomedia, Mad entertainment in association with Medusa film, will be released in theaters from May 25th in 450 copies.
Article published on May 25, 2022 - 17:32 pm
Video Chronicles
