Hugh? .
“A happy man will achieve nothing in his life,” millionaire Giovanni Athos tells the film’s main character, journalist Massimo, a few minutes before his suicide. Before this incident, Massimo had been writing to a newspaper about sports. He wrote very well, but Giovanni realizes that the master of the word football is not at all interesting. The pursuit of millions, like the pursuit of a successful career, is often an escape from the past. Massimo’s talent to talk about football matches awakens at the age of 9 when his father takes him to the stadium in his native Turin. After the match, the boy nervously, frantically comments on what he saw, scaring his father, who hoped to entertain the child with a sports spectacle and distract him from thinking about the past. In which Massimo had a mother who wished him pleasant dreams for the night. The film opens and ends – as if enveloped – with that happy past, the fullness of the child’s life next to a loving and caring mother. And then the mother disappeared - Massimo is said to have fallen ill, gone to the hospital, asked to go to heaven - but for the boy she is alive, because otherwise it simply does not happen, otherwise it never was.
Director Marco Bellocchio shows Massimo as a child, teenager and adult, moving effortlessly through time. And every age accompanies that pain of loss. Bellocchio chooses the main nerve of the hero’s life and strung on it childish stubbornness, philosophical search for a teenager, emotional problems of an adult. A child summons the creepy TV ghost of Belfagoras, a teenager lights all the candles in the temple, wanting to light the light of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, all for the sake of meeting his mother. The devastated adult seems to have forgotten everything, but the old sadness returns again and again, breaking through now with a panic attack, then with a touching newspaper confession about how great it is to be able to hug my mother.
Bellocchio shows not the life of a person, but his fate, that is not the wind of change wearable leaf of a tree, but the heavy tree itself, growing either from the bitter root of childhood tragedy, or from the sweet root of maternal love. A tree, wherever it grows, feeding on the same juices of love and sorrow until it finds the source of new love.
10 out of 10
Original