«Lovely Boy»: a «broken» tale that guides us towards pain

In a world where we want stories to end well, the thought that self-destruction can be an end in itself runs the risk of driving us mad because, if there is no happy ending, maybe those stories aren’t even worth it. worth investing. Lovely Boy, the new film by Francesco Lettieri produced by Indigo Film and Vision Distribution, presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival’s Day of the Authors and available on Sky Cinema from 4 October, it is not a story of redemption and, perhaps, not even of self-destruction: it is the personal path undertaken by a lost soul who no longer knows what to fight for and what to continue living for.

The protagonist, brilliantly interpreted by the angular and emaciated Andrea Carperzano, is a trapper named Nic, aka Lovely Boy, who represents, with his tattoos, autotune and slurred speech, the most classic iconography linked to the Italian trap. At a certain point Nic, no one knows why and no one knows why, gets lost. At the beginning of the film we find it already like this: prey to a state of unconsciousness, the result of a deadly mix of smoke, weed, cocaine, ketamine, psychotropic drugs, ecstasy, speed and any other substance capable of numbing, disconnecting, disorienting.

Nic the success of the duo XXG, a sort of rapidly rising Dark Polo Gang, and the love for his girlfriend (an unrecognizable Ludovica Martino with black hair and a lip piercing) doesn’t enjoy them because he doesn’t feel them: his only concern is to seek refuge in a safe dimension that closes him to the outside world, which sees him as a lanky mummy who struggles to articulate words and stay focused for more than 15 seconds. Hence the last desperate attempt by the family: send him to a rehabilitation center in the Dolomites so that Lovely Boy regains control of himself and can return to life. The protected context of a community that seems literally on the edge of the world, very similar to the one for the deaf and dumb in which the character of Riz Ahmed ends up in Sound of Metal, a film that would certainly have deserved more consideration at the 2021 Oscars, strives to reconnect it to reality by abstraction. In the Lovely Boy center, emptied of any identity, he tries to re-appreciate life through the little things: serving at the table, shoveling horse droppings, taking on the responsibility of shopping for everyone.

Essay on Generational Differences.

Procedure: 👇#LovelyBoy Monday 4 at 9.15 pm on Sky Cinema#SkyOriginal pic.twitter.com/yO75I2fE0e

– Sky (@SkyItalia) September 29, 2021

We would like to tell you that the road to redemption and rehabilitation is open, but the great thing about Lettieri’s film is that nothing is taken for granted. We know that, used to wanting to protect ourselves from everything, whether it is from the confinement imposed by the lockdown or from the fact that Bambi’s mother dies in the middle of the film, traumatizing the adults of tomorrow forever, every pain seems to us a useless effort to bear. We think we have suffered too much and deserve to be happy, but the truth is that a life without pain is not a life. and that, without the pain, we would not be able to appreciate the beauty of what happens to us. Lovely Boy, after all, it is a film that talks about this: the pain that is essential to be reborn or, simply, to exist. Everything moves in a rarefied dimension that each of us, at least once in our life, has faced in the silence of our hearts, where the interference of Instagram and the chatter of others does not reach. The journey is psychedelic, punctuated by trap music and upset by violence of some scenes – one above all that of Nic’s dog – which we will hardly forget. The point is precisely this: to recognize that we are “broken”, to use a term dear to Eshkol Nevo, to understand that, after all, we are profoundly right. If not for others, at least for us.

(Opening photo by Glauco Canalis)