I get there early enough to take a central seat. In recent years I have grown particularly trigonometric in this respect. Within a few minutes, Numana’s outdoor cinema is completely full. Literally, not a single seat is left empty. The last time I witnessed such a prodigy was when I saw Villeneuve’s Blade Runner at the Curzon Soho, only now everybody seems to be determined to stay awake until the end. Wagging its curly tail between chairs’ and humans’ legs—mine, specifically—there’s even a dog in the audience. ‘Does it bother you?’ asks politely the lady who just sat down next to me. ‘Not in the slightest,’ I reply, ‘though I fear from there it won’t see a thing.’ Unlike the dog, who licks its flews in dejected agreement, she doesn’t get the joke. It wasn’t really one anyway.
At twenty past nine, when the show is scheduled to start, there’s still confusion. People are chatting, some are blankly scrolling through their Facebook feeds, an old man in flip-flops is listening to a football match, a couple takes a bench from the foyer and places it to the side as many are still standing. When we seem to have found an acceptable configuration, the projectionist is given the all clear and the idents start rolling. As if so far the experience hadn’t been beautifully old-fashioned enough, I realise that the lights have been forgotten on. But I don’t mind because I remember the ritual, and I eagerly anticipate it. Giving a final blessing to the perfect atmosphere for a film titled Nostalgia, somebody shouts from the back, luci! And as a gentle blow of wind brings us the smell of grilled seafood from a nearby restaurant—not popcorns and gummy bears—we are entrusted to the silent moonlight.
Mario Martone lets us through the hidden doors of a district of Naples sadly known not only for having been the birthplace of Totò. Coming by plane like strangers, we secure our valuable belongings in the vault of an anonymous hotel room. Then we go to the balcony to enjoy the view on what, from there, could be any city. Not until the camera pans right, revealing the unmistakable silhouette of mount Vesuvio in the far distance. This is not any city. Come dusk, we take a stroll in the hectic maze of market stands and noisy locals. Rione Sanità has often been visited by filmmakers—Vittorio De Sica to name one—but never to such a degree of insight and sincerity.
What makes Nostalgia instantly captivating, and more so as we move through its mysteries, isn’t much the melancholy figure of Felice, but the urban vignettes we glimpse in the background. Before we know it, we are seduced by the rugged beauty of the city, its inhabitants. When in the final part both the structure and the message of the film suddenly crumble into an unimaginative resolution worthy of a cheap crime fiction, we are still under the spell and somehow spared the disappointment.
As a relatively minor note, I felt the occasional intrusions of the music redundant and inopportune. But what has definitely left a mark in my memory—sure am not alone here—is the scene where Felice baths his elderly mother. A plastic basin is in the middle of an almost surreal space lit by a bleak bulb pendant. An ancestral sense of intimacy finds its forgotten depth in the electric humidity of the room. The unease, however palpable, never becomes disturbing for the audience, never humiliating for the mother, or the son. Rather, it leads us all to be touched by the most natural expression of love.