Gabriele Salvatores
Tutto il mio folle amore

Since 1991, when he won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film with Mediterraneo, Gabriele Salvatores has entered the pantheon of contemporary Italian directors.

But time passes and the new millennium begins. Our Oscar-winning director, after Puerto Escondido (1992), decides to leave behind the theme of escaping from reality and, after an important "experimental" phase (Nirvana, Denti and Amnesia), he focuses on the world of adolescence. Thus, film after film, he observes this transitional age, trying to capture its crises, contradictions, and obstacles, as one relates to one's own self, inter pares, and with adults, both near and far.

After the famous Io non ho paura, the excellent and dramatic Come Dio comanda, and the experiment (for the bel paese cinema) of Il ragazzo invisibile, in 2019 Salvatores directed Tutto il mio folle amore.

Tutto il mio folle amore: do you remember Franco and Andrea Antonello, father and son who, around 2010, appeared in many TV talk shows to tell their story? Yes? Well, the film is inspired by a story of their journey to tell...

...a sui generis road movie. The film would be all in the story of a runaway, that of sixteen-year-old Vincent, hiding in the back of his father's car, Willy, and a pursuit, made by his mother, along the roads of Slovenia and Croatia, and by her partner, Mr. Mario Topoi. It would be, I said, as this is also the story of a (temporary) leaving of the maternal nest by Vincent, the story of the expiation of a sense of guilt, the story of the knowledge of the other, and finally the story of the sudden discovery of happiness and a sense for lives that had lost their meaning...

It is Willy (Claudio Santamaria) who "suddenly discovers happiness", he who had run away before the birth of his son, he who had not appeared for the last sixteen years. Willy was immature, and he still is, dividing his activities into phases, trying to bring order to his life, and this journey is a moment of maturing even for him. It is Elena (Valeria Golino) and Mario (Diego Abatantuono) who have raised Vincent, day by day. In a continuous and relentless struggle to give him affection and warmth, but at the same time autonomy. Every strategy is experimental. Life is still mostly a mystery, so if it works, Edgar Allan Poe is told at home to be calm, to be at peace with the world, the story of Arthur Gordon Pym.

To be calm, because the days have not been very calm in the family, since Elena was told: "Your son is probably autistic". And the strategies work and don't work, and in the film, in this journey, a moment, a poetic dream is lived... and in this dream for Vincent, the strategy of Willy of dividing activities into three phases works and talking to him through a computer works. It lightens Vincent's anxiety. And so Vincent grows... And with him, Willy grows... And, without Vincent, Mario and Elena also grow...

"Whatever works," Boris Yellnikoff used to say. Therefore, perhaps we should insist on the path sketched during this film, the path tried by Vincent, Willy, Elena, and Mario. Truly coexisting with this syndrome.

"Thirty people dedicating a day a month each to an autistic boy", this is what is needed, Franco Antonello advises, and I, who have known Alex and his extraordinary pen for just a few hours a day, on this subject I can only listen and take notes.

This film, on the other hand, does what a film can do: tell a story, talk about something that is too little known, explore a sense of guilt, and leave you with a lump in your throat. The rest, in life, is up to each of us.