Mario Martone’s beautifully shot and superbly composed film teeters on the edge of something special. And if it doesn’t quite achieve that, settling in the end for something more generically crime-oriented, it’s still very good. Naples looks wonderful here, although very different from the city that Paolo Sorrentino depicted in The Hand of God. A middle-aged guy comes back to his home town after 40 years away, arriving on a plane from Cairo: this is Felice, played by the craggily expressive Pierfrancesco Favino. A great deal of the film’s opening movement is just Felice walking around, overwhelmed with bittersweet memories that he cannot put into words: the streets, the stores, the churches, the balconies, the kids. (The film uses silent Super 8 flashbacks to make explicit some of what he’s remembering.)
Felice makes an emotional visit to his ageing mother, Teresa – a delectably sad portrayal from Aurora Quattrocchi – and is angry to see that she has sold the apartment he grew up in and has moved to a dingy ground-floor flat in what he suspects was a ruinous deal. But mother and son are deeply moved to see each other again and there is a touching scene when Felice takes her tiny naked body in his arms and bathes her.
