A very black film, like the soul of its protagonist, broken by an irreparable pain: “Nottefonda” by and with Francesco di Leva, comes out on Thursday 8 May at the cinema and brings the viewer to explore an hell of suffering that becomes a funnel from which, the protagonist, Cyrus, is increasingly sucked into. To direct this hard inner journey is Giuseppe Miale Di Mauro, while the role on which the entire film, that of Ciro rests, is entrusted to an intense Francesco di Leva, who also signs the script together with the director and Bruno Oliviero. The crucial role of Luigi, the son of the protagonist, is instead entrusted to Mario Di Leva, son of Francesco, and with the active assets already on the set. In the cast also Adriano Pantaleo, in the role of Carmine, Dora Romano in that of Angela, Giuseppe M. Gaudinio to play the role of Rosario. Nottefonda is freely drawn from the novel The road of the Americans.

Nightfonda, the plot

In an always nocturnal or bruised Naples, like the soul of the protagonist, Ciro moves with difficulty. He is a man who is closing more and more in himself and in a pain he cannot manage. He vents with substances and with strange car trips around the city, which undertakes every night. Those of Ciro are not around in the city asleep, they are pilgrimages of suffering and tormented explorations in search of the answers he needs to try to return to being himself. In fact, the tragedy that belonged to him is the car accident that killed his wife one evening. From that day, Ciro has also stopped living and every night he returns to the accident site, mentally traces the evening that changed his life and above all investigates, looking for information on the car that overwhelmed that of his wife. An hallucinated and angry wandering, but punctual and constant: every night, until the sunrise pushes him to return home where he lives with the elderly mother and where he finds his 13 -year -old son Luigi, both worried about the life of the man who goes to roll. Luigi then, there is no night that does not insist on joining the father in his explorations, and here he is there: a boy, on the back seat of a car that wanders without real direction in a dark and endless late at night. As the viewer enters the torments of Ciro, however, he begins to guess that something does not return, and that the true dimension of the story is another, up to the final turning point.

Nightfonda, all the darkness of the world in the soul of a broken man

Nottefonda is a film that has all the explosive power of a sudden mourning, unexpected and devastating, which erases everything: life as it was known at that moment, priorities, perspectives, values, in a loss of meaning that overwhelms and distorts everything, starting with everyday life but also from the perception of the world of those who are affected. This is what happens in Ciro, a destroyed man who no longer finds the direction, with a life nailed at the time of the tragedy that hit him and who leaves everything gradually go all: work, social relationships, himself. Everything while sinking not only in the obsession with reconstructing the night of the accident but, above all, in the sense of guilt of the survivor, struggling with a trauma that takes away everything. Already only from this small description, you can imagine what complex and hard role we are talking about, a role that an actor of great talent like Francesco Di Leva, manages to bring home in the best way, without ever a smudging, without overdoing it, keeping a very difficult measure and calibrating himself to tune in to the devastated soul of his Ciro. A perfect interpretation, which also rests on the skill of his co-protagonist, Francesco Di Leva, at the height of such a complex story. The film owes a lot of its success to these two interpretations, while if we have to indicate a very small flaw, it is that of the plot twist which, at some point in the film, it is impossible not to get to guess. But Nottefonda is a film that does not propose to amaze, but to conduct, even abruptly, the viewer in the darkest meanders of human experience, to then return to the light and surface, more aware of the precariousness of everything.

VOTE: 6.5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0hyAfpans0