Nostalgia, the pain of closeness

What do you show and say about Naples and why this and not another city felt the need to tell Mario Martone, a Neapolitan who moved to Rome many years ago without a Capuano to scold him, here is the question that at our modest local level is worth the worth asking yourself and to which perhaps you can answer without too many compliments. Nostalgia would be the poignant feeling of distance, as in the case of the protagonist of Tarkovskij’s film, a man of language, the discontented intellectual who remembers Russia inside himself while wandering in the company of a Botticelli beauty in flesh and blood. With the strange language of Pierfrancesco Favino, whose exceptional mimetic abilities almost exhaust the skill of the actor, Felice Lasco di Rea instead finds himself experiencing the pain of origin as an exile returning to his Neapolitan homeland.

In his case, as told by Martone, the suffering in the closeness and friction with the past that is literally present in the old age of his mother, in the dark alleys and dilapidated houses, with the archaic violence of the betrayed friend and in chaos of the neighborhood that perhaps will rise from the darkness thanks to the enlightened parish priest. Nostalgia was an itinerary towards abstraction. That extra bit counted as aspiration in many ways. The melancholy Russian did not want the beautiful Domiziana Giordano and did not want to see Piero della Francesca’s painting up close, because even the beauty of art could no longer bear. His alter ego, the mad poet Domenico, burned in the square for extreme sacrifice, surrendering himself to his destiny with pure spirit in smoke. Felice, the protagonist of Martone’s film makes the reverse journey: from pity for the dying body of his mother, cared for and washed with Muslim spirituality, to the growing frenzy for a life once again possible in contact with the street church of the courageous priest.

In Neapolitan history for there is a worm that devours destiny, removing all hope, extinguishing the light: an original sin binds the homeless Felice to his double Oreste, the shadow of himself who barricaded himself in the headquarters of the Sanit to command the army of teenage evil ghosts. The theme is only touched upon, perhaps in an unconscious way, yet between the insistent ablutions of Felice-Favino and the sweaty undershirt of a sticky Oreste-Spider, as between the well-furnished bourgeois house in Cairo and the shacks in which dirty ancient life tingles, the decisive symbolic match is taken. Naples the return to the sick body of lost youth, of disillusioned hopes, of sins to be corrected, the sacred place where, in the absence of new abstract political and cultural principles, to be assumed and for which to fight in first person, many take refuge behind the cassock of the priest on duty, that the old and stale way of not facing evil by taking refuge in feelings of guilt to confess in private, perhaps behind a camera.

Martone’s nostalgia seems to me the document of intellectual surrender to the old and false commitment of the Neapolitan bourgeoisie, the one that goes little to the parish but finances it a lot so that it takes on the responsibility of alleviating the injustices of the world by putting them to play in the media carousel of good people. actions and good hopes. Felice’s new life is killed in an alley. His killer also steals his memory embedded in an old photograph. The last image of death is lost in the credits. And the cinema goes far away again. Reality did not become realism. Perhaps because realism no longer has any faith in real life, cultivating only a vague nostalgia for it, as a thing of the past, as a thing of the past, as antique dealers but also as infamous junk dealers, in short, a festival stuff, for people in tuxedos or in fashionable cassocks. All in the last red place left in the world, the red carpet, the catwalk for photographers.