Venice 2024 review: Nonostante (Valerio Mastandrea)

“While Mastandrea has made a film that can be enjoyed by a wide audience, he resolutely sticks to the logic of the film’s purgatorial world and doesn’t feel the need to provide a typical romcom happy ending.”

Popular Italian actor/director Valerio Mastandrea opens the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti sidebar with Nonostante (Feeling Better), a gently melancholic dramedy that takes a unique life-and-death angle in examining how life is best lived when taking risks and opening yourself up to new experience. Modest in its ambitions, Mastandrea’s film is nonetheless rather charming, and is an ideal opening film for this section of the festival.

Taking place in the coma ward of a Rome hospital, Nonostante quickly introduces its quirky setup: while patients lie comatose, their souls roam the hospital wards and beyond, taking in life around them with a sense of detachment and freedom from responsibilities. The protagonist (Mastandrea) is a man who has grown to enjoy this state of limbo alongside two other long-term hospital residents (Lino Musella and Laura Morante), and who spends his days either wandering the hospital grounds or drifting through the streets of Rome. But his outlook changes once the ward’s new patient, a feisty woman (Dolores Fonzi) who refuses to accept a life of stasis, forces him to reexamine his own relaxed attitude towards his purgatorial state.

While Nonostante deals with topics that could have been handled in an overly treacly and sentimental manner, Mastandrea the director brings a refreshingly light touch to the material and has crafted a winning romance that deftly mixes moments of dry comedy and gentle sadness, all while posing existential questions about the passive role we sometimes take in our own lives. The movie also benefits from strong work by the ensemble cast. Mastandrea the actor has a certain everyman/hangdog quality that is perfect for playing a man slowly waking up to the pleasures of life and romance and realizing that he does not want to let that go, which lays the groundwork for the more dramatic final section of the film. Dolores Fonzi is a strong romantic foil to Mastandrea as the initially prickly and standoffish woman who grows to appreciate the freedom that this state of limbo offers, while at the same time refusing to give up on her desire to return to the land of the living. She also shares a warm, easygoing chemistry with Mastandrea that brings a lot of charm to the film, and the sequence in which the two sneak away from a group outing to explore the countryside (set to T. Rex’s ‘Cosmic Dancer’) is a lovely visual interlude. And as two very different friends to the protagonist, Musella and Morante are delightful sidekicks, with the former serving both as our guide to this purgatory and as the protagonist’s friend/therapist, while the latter is an acerbic delight in her limited screen time as a jaded translator who provides commentary on the comings and goings of the ward, whether it be the behavior of the living or that of those in limbo.

While one might argue that this material could have been the basis for a much more complex film that focuses more on the philosophical and existential questions raised rather than the personal relationships, Valerio Mastandrea has made a crowd-pleasing film that encourages the viewers to reflect on their own lives, and what they could be missing out on by staying on the sidelines and sticking to safe routines rather than trying new things, meeting new people, and taking risks. It is also admirable that while Mastandrea has made a film that can be enjoyed by a wide audience, he resolutely sticks to the logic of the film’s purgatorial world and doesn’t feel the need to provide a typical romcom happy ending. Instead, Nonostante leaves us to ponder the power of fate and accepting one’s destiny, along with the unexpected connections forged between strangers that can leave an impact, no matter how subliminal.