17/01/2024 - The new film by Marco Risi tackles the relationship between the young and the elderly, avoiding sentimentality and directing an excellent cast of actors from across the generations

The coronavirus pandemic confronted the world with a moral dilemma regarding the social category of the elderly: their greater fragility to the virus and the doctors’ choices in the urgency of the pandemic, their interrupted contact with the outside world, death in solitude, and their relatives’ inability to grieve. Marco Risi, a director who has always espoused a socially aware and investigative cinema (Mery per sempre, Muro di gomma, Fortapasc [+see also:
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film profile]) tackled the issue of the relationship between the young and the elderly in The Dew Point, released in Italian cinemas from 18 January via Fandango Distribuzione after it played out of competition at the Torino Film Festival in November. There is never any mention of Covid in the film but the date that appears at the beginning (Summer 2018) and the on-screen text at the end dramatically bring it to mind, like an imminent tsunami that will sweep away everything.

Carlo (Alessandro Fella) and Manuel (Roberto Gudese), two people in their thirties, are accompanied by the police to Villa Bianca, an elegant retirement home for the elderly, where they will have to serve a year of community service after being convicted of causing a serious car accident while intoxicated, for the former, and for drug dealing, for the later. Despite the instructions of the strict director of the facility, Carlo continues to lead his usual wild lifestyle and leaves the villa every evening to join his friends. When he accidentally meets the girl who was scarred in the accident he caused, he ignores her, lacking the courage to apologise. A scene with his family sheds light on his own circumstances: his family is very rich, and his father, who has remarried with a young woman, ignores him. The boy fills this emotional void, finding a father figure in one of the elderly guests of the villa, a depressed former photographer who is contemplating suicide (the excellent Massimo De Francovich). He even finds true love with a young nurse (Lucia Rossi).

With an attentive, measured and masterful direction, Risi decodes the old tropes about the relationship between the generations, avoiding sentimentality, clichés, and breaks in tone. He harmoniously weaves together the lives of all the guests thanks to a phenomenal cast of elderly actors (Erso Pagni, Luigi Diberti, Erica Blanc, Elena Cotta, Maurizio Micheli) alternating between lighthearted and dramatic moments, following a screenplay (written together with Francesco Frangipane and Riccardo de Torrebruna) that does not seek to create emotional blackmail. The film creates a profound identification, offering a vision from within that generation.

Paraphrasing Freud when he argued that, in their unconscious, everyone is convinced of their own immortality, Rici shows that in their unconscious, everyone is also convinced of their own youth, especially when death hovers above. In a society that interprets physical decay not as biographical maturity but as weakness, that has learned to ignore the sacredness of bodies which do not adhere to aesthetic and performative standards, and that underestimates the value of testimony, of old age as a place where meaning is deposited, Risi asks us to believe in a new possible reconciliation between ourselves and that old father missing from our society.

The Dew Point was produced by Fandango with Rai Cinema.

(Translated from Italian)