Nostalgia (Mario Martone, 2022) (Patreon)

A funny thing happened while I was originally composing this review. I got about a paragraph out, which was pretty much my usual stuff: a bit of background on the director, his major festival appearances (this film was in competition at Cannes last year), and a note explaining that this is the first film by Martone I've seen, despite some evidence that he's a bit of a big deal in Italy.

Then, as sometimes happens, I was called away before I finished the review. I had to feed the dog, make dinner, cut down some dying shrubs in the front yard with a chainsaw, do the after-dinner dishes... Suddenly it was about six hours later. Sometimes this distraction allows me to mentally outline the review in my head, so I can hammer it out pretty quickly once I get back to the keyboard. But in this case, all I could think about was how much I did not want to write about Nostalgia. This film is an utter waste of time.

Apparently this is adapted from a novel. I don't know the book, but maybe this accounts for all the time the protagonist, Felice (Pierfrancesco Favino), spends aimlessly wandering around his old neighborhood in Naples. These might've been places where interior monologue once existed, but Martone just decided to use them as an armature for the worst Visconti impression imaginable. Nostalgia is interminable, but not in a "slow cinema" way. In fact, there is nothing distinguished about Nostalgia as a cinematic work. The camerawork and editing are serviceable at best, the mise-en-scène nonexistent. Favino, who was rather commanding in Bellocchio's The Traitor, delivers a whiny, petulant performance as a guy who left Naples as a boy but has come back to care for his ailing mother (Aurora Quattrocchi) and then, after she passes, decides hey, this is where I belong, despite the numerous warnings by his former best friend, the local crime lord (Tommaso Ragno), that he'd better go home or he's gonna get whacked.

Yes, Nostalgia comes close to being what Roger Ebert called an "idiot plot," wherein someone does something incredibly stupid just to keep the story (such as it is) going. I haven't even mentioned Martone's irksome decision to insert flashbacks to Felice's youth, in windowboxed framing that I guess is supposed to evoke Super-8. Or the tinkly prestissimo score that kicks in only during moments of danger. Or the way the village priest (Francesco Di Leva) keeps taking Felice around to various homes, introducing him as "someone worth knowing," so that Felice can tell stories that are 100% exposition. Or the fact that at one point, Felice explains to a young art history student (Virginia Apicella) that he's having a lot of memories about his childhood, and she replies, I shit you not, "oh, you're experiencing nostalgia." 

This is garbage.