Nostalgia
Mario Martone’s 2022 film Nostalgia is an impressive yet troubling account of a man’s resolve to come to terms with his own past. Drawn back to a place, a world, he had left hurriedly and anxiously forty years before, Felice rediscovers both its sweetness and its terror. The description of a society subdued by violence is subtle. We encounter ‘a world of danger boiled down to pregnant pauses and minute gestures’, wrote Teo Bugbee in the NYT. Yet in the midst of it, what tenderness. Felice’s reunion with his aged, frail mother is almost unbearably movingly portrayed. An idealistic young priest, a friend to the outcast, provides that rare thing: a representation in modern media of a Catholic priest who is at once credible, humane, and profoundly dedicated. As the film progresses and Felice reintegrates a part of himself he had amputated, he grows in stature and in freedom. How one would have wished such a film to end happily!
