Nostalgia

There was already an illustrious Nostalghia: the most Italian film by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, released in 1983. Now there will be this 100% Italian Nostalgia, unrelated to its predecessor but sharing its dark beauty. Naples is the spellbinding setting and the frightening subject, as the shadow of the mafia looms. Director Mario Martone films the return of a man after decades away (we gradually learn the reasons for his exile), his peregrinations among the ruins and ghosts. And suddenly, the life Felice has built in Egypt (marriage, professional success, prosperity, conversion to Islam) attracts him less than his past. Returning to Naples, where he grew up until the age of 15, becomes an almost mystical experience for him, between the extreme fragility of his elderly mother, a former seamstress he hasn’t seen for forty years, and the melancholic contemplation of a place that, in many ways, has not changed, haunted by images of his youth: la dolce vita, but also delinquency and violence. (Louis Guichard; telerama.fr)