maybe it’s not that important to be good, but Palmiero is

Alberto Palmiero he is a boy from Aversa, province of Caserta. He graduated in directing at the Centro Sperimentale, he made some short films that went well, but his career is struggling to take off. Not like his friend Mino Capuano, who is filming his first feature film. Thirty-year-old in crisis, Alberto then decides to leave behind his dreams as a director, the bare apartments in East Rome, the evenings in San Lorenzo and the appearances for a series of Looker behind, and go home. To do what, however, is not clear.
At home there are mum and dad, at first understanding, then a little less; there are lifelong friends, including an aspiring musician who is always wearing sunglasses, like a perfect provincial Dylan (or Godard); there’s also an old flame, and a new dog. There is, after a few days, and at the end of the day, an emptiness very similar to what Alberto felt in Rome.

In Tenerimi Prese Alberto Palmiero, obviously, tells his story. His crisis, his impasse. He does it with a film that was the brilliant overcoming of it, shot with very few means, very few people, having friends and relatives act. Even the producers, given that Gianluca Arcopinto appears in the role of himself, as do his colleagues Bellocchio and Capuano.

Autofiction, sure, but it works. Umbilical? Certainly, but with such self-irony as to be able to find, within such a personal question, something that goes around and becomes universal. Because small or large, work-related or not, we have all had crises like Alberto’s in some way, and like him we resolved them when we found – in ourselves, in something, in someone – the courage to stop sitting on our hands and do something. Try something. Without fears, those that – truly – had distanced Palmiero from Rome and his aspirations.
“And what do I care that you’re not good?”, Alberto says to another friend, with whom he had studied computer science, and to whom he had turned to find a job in that sector. Friend categorically refuses, because for him Alberto’s path is different, despite his doubts: “It’s not important if you’re good, the important thing is that it makes you feel alive, that it makes you feel good”.

And then, needless to say, Alberto Palmiero is really good.
Maybe he knows it, maybe he forgets it, maybe that shyness and melancholy that he puts on the screen (a melancholy that doesn’t come from watching a film and smoking a joint, as for yet another friend, more superficial than Alberto) are real, and not just cinematic affectations which cannot fail to have been influenced, conscious or otherwise, by Massimo Threethe. Of that of Morettithen, let’s not talk about it: but declined in minor, without the security and bravado. Moretti and Troisi, as already in the debut of Filippo Barbagallowho compared to Palmiero has cinematic pedigree but evidently similar sensibilities.

Palmiero’s melancholy works, his disenchantment works, his shyness works. The sly and ironic gaze he has first of all on himself, and then on the rest of the world, including cinema, works, just as his gaze behind the camera works, too. AND, in a film built on himself, everything around him, he has the rare gift nowadays of making you feel good, and not letting even an iota of ego and pomposity shine through. Bravo.