Italy selects Mario Martone’s Cannes competition title Nostalgia as their Oscar 2023 entry.
When I first visited Naples, I believed I recognised it immediately. It was the Marrakesh of Europe. That was why I was immediately sold on Martone’s protagonist whose history intertwines a childhood in Naples with the exile in Cairo. There is something about Naples that makes people it brought up keep coming back into the fold. It is everywhere these days revitalized by the pen of Ferrante and the camera of Sorrentino. Martone’s Nostalgia is another poignant addition to Naples’ hagiography.
Nostalgia is the story of Felice, returning home for the first time in 40 years. He first rushes to see his mother, but nothing is as he remembers. She sold his childhood home and is now a fragile and remorseful old woman. Why didn’t you have children, she chides. Why didn’t you come to visit me, he bites back. Theirs is not the only relationship laced with bitterness. Seeing his mother’s diminishing state, he decides to stay so he can care for her, bathe her (an emotional, powerful scene) and finally bury her.
The rest of his time Felice spends retracing and rediscovering the streets of Naples. This is where he comes across the inflammatory priest Don Luigi and where he hopes to reconcile with childhood friend Oreste. In a way Felice is in purgatory from the moment he arrives in Naples. He has returned to face his past and have his soul weighed and measured. Oreste and Don Luigi battle over it. The streets are where the fight between good and bad play out with Oreste and Luigi as de facto rivalling gang leaders. The parallel is drawn unmistakably when Don Luigi invites Felice on one of his Sunday walks. While Oreste recruits with promise of easy money and frightening reputation, Don Luigi lures with compassion, pride and more than a little manipulation. His and Oreste’s methods are the same, although the results are arguably different.
Don Draper described nostalgia as a twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone and in the end Nostalgia becomes a battle of the urges. I need to see him, Felice speaks of Oreste despite being warned about the dangers Oreste now poses. But Felice is incapable of fighting off the urge to return to the memory of the past and his demise is locked in holding on to the memory of happiness and friendship that is no longer a reality.
The melodramatic ending finally reveals its true hand and reveals Nostalgia to be a neapolitan opera. Once you look at it that way, all the exaggerated faces, the endless walks and meandering story reveal emotions that add up to more than the sum of their parts. And perhaps the movie imbues you with a little nostalgia of its own.
