Mario Martone has never benefited from a visibility comparable to Italian filmmakers recognized and identified in France, such as Marco Bellocchio, Nanni Moretti or Paolo Sorrentino. Revealed with Death of a Neapolitan mathematician in 1992, followed by remarkable films like Theater of War (1998) and The Smell of Blood (2003), the filmmaker then failed to impose his universe on a lasting basis. The director advances in spurts and resurgences, yet still awaited by loyal moviegoers to the revelation of a filmography marked by a deep humanism and a taste for tragedy staged with an austerity that is worth manifesting.
Nostalgia, which opens with a quote from Pier Paolo Pasolini – “Knowledge is in nostalgia. Who is not lost does not know himself. – , begins with the return of a man to his hometown. His name is Felice Lasco and is interpreted by this formidable actor who is Pierfrancesco Favino, magnified in The Traitor (2019), by Marco Bellocchio.
We will soon learn that this mysterious character has made his fortune as an entrepreneur in Egypt, that there is a woman waiting for him, that he has converted to Islam and that he has not feet in Italy for forty years. The reason for this absence is the subject of the film. Returning to soften the last days of an old mother who will quickly die in his arms, Felice comes in truth to settle an old score, both with himself and with his tumultuous youth.
An ultra-violent mobster
By getting closer to a combat priest, engaged in the city, fighting against the influence of the Camorra on disadvantaged young people and who assisted his mother in her old age, Felice gradually opens up to him. Inaugurated as a pure and intense mystery, the film therefore becomes more didactic and predictable. He returned to his native neighborhood of Sanita, a former burial place and catacombs in Naples, which had become a popular and underprivileged sector, where death disputed him daily with life, to see again a teenage friend with whom he had entered delinquency.
A burglary turned into a murder. The two friends never saw each other again and Felice was sent by his uncle to the Middle East, where he will have built his life. His return, however, endangers the man who has become the “Malhommo” of the neighborhood, an ultra-violent mobster who reigns terror and leads young people into the worst traffic. Felice, who is advised to leave the city immediately, nevertheless desperately wants to meet her friend, settle, in a word, the accounts of her own life and resume the course of her destiny.
Throwing his actors into the local population, Martone films the twists and turns of this story by superimposing them on those, magnificent and funereal, of the neighborhood, drawing from them the spiritual geography of his hero.
