THE memories resurface in waves in the noisy streets of Health district of Naples. There is a middle-aged man, Felice Lasco, played by the always very talented Pierfrancesco Favinowhich returns after forty years of absence, arrives from Cairo to find his elderly mother. The call of the past with which she finds herself to deal sinks him in the feeling that gives the title to the film of Mario Martone: Nostalgia. Presented in competition at the festival of Cannes and now in theaters, is based on the novel by Ermanno Rea.
The meeting with the mother elderly, gracefully interpreted by Aurora Quattrocchi, is the highest point of the first part. There is a moving scene in which the son who picks up his mother, deposits her in the bathtub and washes her. Felice no longer remembers even his mother tongue well, his words escape him, he has even forgotten the face of a dear family friend, but slowly he regains possession of his rootsand is convinced that he can fix the past in which a secret is hidden, the one that led him to escape from Naples: the involuntary complicity in a crime committed by his childhood friend Oreste. Today though Oreste (Tommaso Ragno) is Malommo, the boss of the neighborhood, a leading exponent of the Camorra della Sanità, a man capable of blind violence. Malommo wants Felice to go abroad with his secrets, but the protagonist, in the name of his old friendship, decides to stay and also makes friends with the combative street priest Don Luigi (Francesco Di Leva).
Thus begins a mouse hunt and the film takes the step of thriller. Who will win between the two? What dangers does the call of the past bring? And what is the sense of feeling nostalgic for a neighborhood-place of the soul that is always the same as itself? The tension builds in a crescendo until the final scene.
The third protagonist of the film is Naples, or rather the Sanità district, with its load of ambivalence, unpleasantness And attraction mixed together. Certain faces, certain extras, certain glimpses (one could also say certain flavors and smells if it were not just a film) that give back the soul of a unique place in the world.
Source: Vanity Fair
