A film critic would explain it to you better, with a more technical rationale: Here, instead of gut feeling, it’s told straight through, by thinking back on the mental notes and re-reading the scribbles jotted down on the Moleskine in the dark of a small room.
Walter Veltroni’s latest film – currently in preview but hitting theaters tomorrow with the same title as the book he wrote for Rizzoli in 2017, When, on which it is based – is beautiful, intense, full of politics and emotion (although it was said that it was finally time to reclaim the old right to be excited).
Little clues to the plot, which revolves around the question: what happens in the existence of a man who falls asleep at 18 and wakes up at 49? Giovanni Piovasco, the protagonist, played by Neri Marcorè (impressive in measure and tenderness), was accidentally hit in the head by a flagpole during the funeral of Enrico Berlinguer, secretary of the PCI, on June 13, 1984 in Piazza San Giovanni. in Rome: Deep coma, long sleep caused by the first sequence recording – the voice of Valerio Morucci announcing the death of Aldo Moro on the phone and the advertisement for Urrà Saiwa biscuits, a tube TV, a jukebox, a table football, a Light over there – which led to the unexpected awakening to a whole new world in 2015.
Here indeed: the film runs on a double narrative track, between memory and future, between how we were and how Giovanni finds us, observing through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old communist activist who is now in the body of an adult who cutting his beard, Sister Giulia, a perfect Valeria Solarino under the veil, in the believable manner of the nun who guarded him until the miracle of his return.
Dominant sensation: Giovanni’s amazement at discovering unprecedented reality overrides that of the viewer. Veltroni forces us to look back: yes, we have all come so far through tremendous and crazy seasons, tragic, strikingly beautiful, revolutionary (also from a technological point of view). There’s a scene where Giovanni, while he’s recovering, asks Leo, a troubled boy with selective mutism (played by Fabrizio Ciavoni), if there’s a way to see what he’s been missing out on while he was away. Then Leo pulls out the iPad, the summary of the photos is a powerful and intoxicating breath: from Chernobyl to the fall of the wall, to Tiananmen Square, to Mandela becoming a free man, then through Capaci and the G8 in Genoa, the twin towers , the Bataclan. The last very recent image is the graveyard of a boat loaded with shipwrecked people.
Giovanni, do you like us better? Or worse? That’s exactly what you want to ask him. The film doesn’t judge, however, it has built its own fairytale tone, full of references, allusions, to offer many readings of the bygone era. After all, Veltroni is a director who believes in feelings and in the power of cinema to convey them. So you could say yes, maybe it’s a left film, if being left means having the ability to interpret one’s time: being able to relate one’s values to the changes in an ever-evolving society find. In fact, it’s not a nostalgic film (nostalgia is a more right-handed value, as you know). Of course, there are barrels of pure melancholy (when Giovanni discovers there’s a supermarket on the ground floor of the Botteghe Oscure building, the historic headquarters of the Communist Party). Or bitter irony (“Berlusconi first president of Milan and then of the Council? It was better if I didn’t wake up”).
Then suddenly there is regret about that certain lost sense of community: the sections, the red flags, the unity. “The intentions – says Giovanni – were right” (a not self-evident statement: fuse for a possible media debate, who knows what Elly Schlein thinks of it).
Notes (trying not to spoil too much): Gian Marco Tognazzi and Olivia Corsini, each a historical boyfriend and ex-girlfriend of the protagonist, work very well. Ninni Bruschetta plays the hospital’s chief physician. Anita Zagaria is Giovanni’s mother. Funny cameos (the film laughs a lot) by Stefano Fresi, Michele Foresta (the forest magician) and Massimiliano Bruno. Andrea Salerno, director of La7, is a great forced bartender (always useful in our environment to know how to do another job). There’s Pigi Battista and Professor Renato De Angelis. The real surprise, however, is Dharma Mangia Woods in the role of Giovanni’s daughter.
The last note reads: After an hour, the hope grows that Giovanni will find the courage to kiss Sister Giulia/Solarino. She looks at him eloquently. And frankly, it’s beautiful. Widespread unrest among some invited to the private screening. But admirable composure when the lights came on. Also in the room with us was Giovanni Veronesi (who, in real life, has been Sister Giulia’s companion for twenty-one years).