The sky above a hospital in Rome or even the angels, metaphorically speaking, have the face of Valerio Mastandrea. Despite, second direction by the Roman actoropening film of the Horizons section at Venice 81, is a curious, romantic, mortuary cinematic nuance on the unsaid words, on the missed opportunities, of an ordinary living being. He (Mastandrea) is a gentleman in a black jacket and white shirt who hovers melancholically between the rooms of a half-empty hospital where patients in a coma arrive. He shares a sort of spatial limbo between life and death with the “nosy man” (Linen Musella), yellow raincoat and wool sweater, and the “veteran” (Laura Morante), old elegant suits of bourgeois ladies. Physical doubles of their bodies lying on the beds and attached to machines to survive, the three are not seen by nurses and doctors, but are perceived by the “volunteer” (George Montanini) who delights the servants and the dying with an off-key music therapy.
But when the hour of the dying towards the afterlife arrives, suddenly a very strong wind blows and they are sucked in. Detail that She (Dolores Fonzi), the young new “arrival” in the ward, struggles to understand. It will be He, after an initial furious friction with the restless girl who is willing to do anything (life or death) to get away from there, to explain to her how to cling to life so as not to end up swept away by the wind. He and She, however, in that funny, awkward and rather waxy limbo, will find the thread of a whispered and deep sentimental bond. Initial twenty minutes of bare theatrical dramaturgy that seem to implode around the evident weight of the metaphor (and the scarce presence of the cinema medium), then Despite acquires a good specific weight by leaving aside repetitions and descriptive captions (ghosts mostly become the living…) for a more mature and confident visual reconstruction of suspended angles and perspectives, embellished with a careful light irony (“it was so good in intensive care”).
On the acting level, the work of subtraction leaves room for the creation of a tense general sense of expectation, as a mechanism of the story positively imposed by direction and editing. Despite, dedicated to the director’s father who died in 2014, it gradually brings us back to the crumbling and painful terrain of man’s relationship with the sense of death, but above all with those flames that in life we did not want to keep lit out of fear, indecision or timidity. Mastandrea / Him tossed around, towards the end of the film, in the air thanks to the visual effects department (Rodolfo Migliari, Roberto Saba) it’s a poetic choice from a fragile (super)hero to Shyamalan who visually leaves his mark. He produces, among others, Valeria Golino. In theaters only in March 2025.
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