Xénos, the stranger who is also the guest
Among the ancient Greeks a single word, xénos, named both the stranger and the guest: opening the door wide to anyone who knocks was both a sacred duty and a risk (one never knows which god, or which misfortune, is hidden under the dusty clothes of the traveller). It is in this dizzying ambivalence that Gianni Amelio pitches his tent with No Pain, presented out of competition at the eighty-third Venice International Film Festival. A return that smacks of a showdown, just over thirty years after the Calabrian master left Lamerica suspended on a crowded ship in the middle of the Adriatic. So the question was clear: who is the immigrant, a friend to be welcomed or a stranger to be feared? Today, Amelio confesses in his director's notes, the knot has not been resolved, on the contrary it has tightened, so much so that the only solution (assuming one exists) must be sought in the reason and heart of each of us. Not that good will is enough: the director makes it clear, welcoming is a question for all of Europe and not just for Italy or Spain alone, and he makes Michele Serra's dazzling idea his own, according to which the heart may be enough to welcome, but politics is needed to integrate.
The out of competition, for a filmmaker competing at the Lido eight times, smacks of liberation (he admitted it himself, with the relief of those who feel they have already given). Amelio, who in 1968 was a lone voice against those who then wanted to abolish festival competition, convinced that the public still wants its arena, nevertheless gives us a quiet and implacable film. Davide (an Alessandro Borghi devoted to the asceticism of candor) is a thirty-year-old who makes a living by selling second-hand books in a Roman square that he almost never reads. His most faithful customer, Elsa (a Valeria Golino of painful tenderness), gets him the books and fills him with affection. Then, on a day like a thousand others, something goes wrong: a child from North Africa is "handed over" to him on the street like a package, and from that moment on he never lets go, he follows him in silence. An accident, the rush to hospital, the little stranger suspended between life and death, and Davide sinking into a private hell of reticence and remorse.
It is in the forbidden refuge of the emergency room that Davide meets Aminah (newcomer Beïdja Yahiaoui, a face to keep an eye on), a teenager who has just landed from Algeria on a boat, soaked in rain and visibly pregnant. It can only accommodate it. But it is only the beginning of his personal Odyssey: every evening, returning from work, the man finds more and more unknown people at home, the homeless sleeping under the bridges. He rebels in vain, then gives in, out of generosity or weakness, until the condominiums' complaint sends him to prison for aiding and abetting illegal immigration. Valerio Mastandrea, in the role of Michele, acts as his foster father along this secular via crucis, while Luan Amelio Ujkaj's photography and Fabio Massimo Capogrosso's music keep everything in a suspended chiaroscuro.
Why No Pain, written by Gianni Amelio and Davide Serino, with Andrea Quetti, moves from immigration to do something else: a film about empathy, about the pain of others which almost always remains invisible, glimpsed through a peephole, from a threshold, from a side scene. Each character carries their own secret pain, and Davide (the most similar to us, with his serene apathy, his house, his work) becomes, in spite of himself, the catalyst of a cosmic evil. Borghi defined him as a man of absolute candor, and therefore very far from himself: a pure man, for whom the incipit of the film almost becomes a condemnation, "a story that has yet to happen", that is, one that could happen to anyone. It is no coincidence that the actor confesses that he wondered how he would have behaved in Davide's place: if a friend announced to him that he wanted to host forty strangers in his house, he admits, he would consider him crazy, and it is precisely in that gap between goodness and reason that the question that the film does not resolve lies.
Around him, Amelio bets on three new faces: in addition to Yahiaoui, little Gabriel Bovino and Ramzi Lafrindi, all making their debut. Aminah's interpreter says she has seen first-hand how uncomfortable it is to show oneself vulnerable and how difficult it is to accept the help offered to us, since (this is the lesson of the film) we do not exist only for ourselves, but for others, for the relationships that require us.
Valeria Golino, who is Davide's most tender accomplice, deserves a chapter in her own right. His Elsa is not just the loyal customer who gets him second-hand volumes: she is a university teacher, and it is she who holds in her hands that On Invisible Foundations by Mario Luzi from which the film draws its inspiration and, perhaps, its title. A secluded yet crucial role, which the actress inhabits with painful restraint.
The meeting with Amelio has the flavor of an ancient desire: Golino had dreamed of working with him since he was eighteen, and confesses that he has put aside every instinct to let himself be shaped according to his vision. The director, moreover, directs her by subtraction: he told her, provocatively, that he didn't care if she was good, he wanted her to be beautiful, and she abandoned herself to the point of sadness, until she coincided with the image he was looking for of her. Because here, the actress warns, there is never naturalism: as in Kieślowski's Decalogue, reality is continually suspended, and what you thought was already past remains there, burning. A partnership that hatched for a long time: in that same season Amelio proposed to her a character who ranged from fifteen to seventy, and she, frightened, evoked La ciociara. That film was never made, but they both swear that sooner or later it will happen.
The title remains, that No pain which seems like a promise but is instead an opening. In one scene Elsa holds Invisible Foundations by Mario Luzi in her hands, and it is precisely those verses that illuminate the enigma: there is an extreme point in which suffering is so unbearable that it becomes either death or the seed of a new life. Amelio then evokes Antigone (Davide is the one who helps against the law of men) and even Giambattista Vico, to remind us that the ultimate limit of pain, if it does not destroy us, puts us back into the world. A cinema of moral architecture rather than news, No Pain refuses the shortcut of rhetoric and leaves us alone with the most difficult and risky of occasions: recognizing ourselves as human beings. In cinemas, distributed by 01 Distribution, from 24 September.
