It’s not often that a film changes the chemistry of my beliefs. ‘Nonostante’ which in English is called ‘Feeling Better’ is one of those films and I’m better for watching it — also after interviewing its talented filmmaker and star.
We are a vulnerable kind, destined from the day we are born to die. It is probably one of the reasons we love superhero movies, where those bigger than life figures on the screen aren’t affected by our inevitable fate. To be able to deal with what is coming for all of us, sooner or later, we turn to religion and meditation. We imagine an afterlife where all the wrongs of this world will be made right.
But what if the afterlife turned out to be the place where we go when we aren’t quite dead yet, a location very much resembling where we are on earth, in which we would wear our own clothes, talk in our own voice and manage to connect with other souls in a deep and meaningful way?
In his second directorial venture, beloved Italian actor Valerio Mastandrea asks that question and in his perfectly cinematic answer he manages to quiet down our fears. It’s not often a film, a work of the Seventh Art can do that, but while watching Nonostante — translated into English as Feeling Better but actually meaning “notwithstanding” — I felt a joy, a kind of release from all my doubts and apprehensions at “l'aldilà” — the great beyond.
When I sit down with Mastandrea, I tell him his film redefined what death means for me, and he corrects me by saying “I think for me the redefinition of death in the film is accidental, because mine is a film about life.” The story of Feeling Better, to better understand our conversation, is that of a man in a coma, whose soul in limbo between life and death wanders the halls of the hospital where his body lies. There he (played by Valerio Mastandrea himself) has no worries, but also seems to feel nothing, apart from a bit of aggravation when his body is moved to another room, to accommodate for a new patient. It is in fact this new arrival, a woman (played by Argentinian actress Dolores Fonzi) who was involved in a car accident, who at first annoys Mastandrea’s character, who is in a coma in more ways than just the medical one, but then captures his heart.
In between, we learn that a great wind in the ward means someone is departing this life, and that when patient emerge from a coma they don’t remember any of their interactions in the afterlife limbo. So, the love this man and woman begin to feel for each other is in peril, as one threatens to go away with the wind and the other returns to life.
It’s a film whose heart is in the right place, so much so that weeks after watching it — I was lucky enough to get a link prior to the craziness of Venice — I still replay it in my thoughts. Friends lost, loves gone to another place, all have left the memory of them in me, and that memory still holds all the feelings I had for them. That was the lesson I learned from Nonostante.
Filmmaker Valerio Mastandrea, photo by © Matteo Graia
“Maybe when you talk about life, death is one of those themes, it’s always there,” Mastandrea tells me during our interview, on yet another outstandingly hot day in Venice. “We tried with the wind, to lighten the idea of death, but also to help perceive the great mystery of death — where does this great wind take you, who knows…” The actor, writer, director and producer is cool, kind and smart. But also very, very different from the last role I watched him in, before Nonostante — Paola Cortellesi’s Italian box office hit There’s Still Tomorrow in which he plays the abusive husband.
Roman era poet and philosopher Cicero famously wrote: “The life of the dead is placed on the memories of the living. The love you gave in life keeps people alive beyond their time. Anyone who was given love will always live on in another's heart.” And Mastandrea’s focus in this film, his second directorial venture after his 2018 title Ride is on memories. Or the lack thereof, once a person returns to life after having spent time in a coma. “People end,” Mastandrea says, “but their memories live on in others.”
“This is primarily a love story,” he continues, “yet when you deal with those themes you must come to terms with the ideas of courage, fear, life and death.”
Now, coma and the afterlife could hardly seem like feel good premises for a film, yet Mastandrea’s humor and vulnerable interpretation of the character ensure that the story lives in the grand tones of cinema. There is a magical realism throughout it that evokes the work of Vittorio de Sica and Ermanno Olmi. When I tell him, he concedes that “as long as I’ll make cinema I’ll never give up on that type of thing, because it’s a gift cinema gives you, it allows you to do it.”
With all the controversies here in Venice, about the lack of access to talent for the media etc., the one great thing on the Lido this year is the presence of a new wave of Italian cinema — great, fresh and not made to impress others but rather to express themselves. Themselves being these filmmakers who, like Mastandrea, have stories to tell and aren’t afraid to tell them, in their own special, wonderful way.
Images courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia, used with permission.