There is a kind of sadness that has just lived in an agitated state of Fomo – or for fear of missing, as the acronym does. The experiences you waste if you did not show up on an occasion, the next song you wouldn’t hear if you have left a party too early and so on. In the Italian filmmaker of Francesco Sossai and the second student and quietly, the second trait “The Last One For the Road”, Lively 50-Somethings Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) and Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) seem to have invented the perfect treatment for Fomo in the cheating perpetually. To these no and drunk men, each drunk drink is always the last – really, for real this time, the last – until the next one which generally comes just after. For them, the party is never completely over.
Fortunately, Carlobianchi and Doriano never present themselves as intoxicated and intoxicated goosebumps (the way in which older men who have hardly lost like them could be in real life) and there is a quality of stories for the resulting friendship and quarrel of the duo: it is almost as if their Bromance was marriage, Italian style. Their joyful eternal may seem warm and vague at first glance, but in truth, there is a dark current of their existence, hiding just below the surface. Ancient times seem to have moved away from them quickly. And the 2008 financial crisis was probably tough on them as a pair that burned all the money they had. If only they could dig up the big piece of money that their old friend buried somewhere in town before leaving for Argentina. Maybe they will one day do it, just after this last drink.
Written by Sossai and Adriano Candiago (and vaguely born from some of their real experiences), “the last for the road” seizes the anxieties linked to the aging of its main characters in an acute and personally, amplified manner during the years that you can be considered as nor or young, like the 1970s-Born, Carlobianchi and Doriano. All of a sudden, you realize that the things you could swear happened about 10 years ago are vintage events of three decades spent, and time slows for anyone. So who could blame both for having desperately tried to keep the present?
While Sossai does not dwell exactly to this sadness, its subtle presence always infuses its unpretentious characteristic with melancholic quality, a melancholy aura which recalls the films adjacent to the fable of Alice Rohrwacher. The moving and painful atmosphere of Rohrwacher’s films is also in the context of the Escapades of Carlobianchi and Doriano while they prohibit, exchange random stories (perhaps real, perhaps made up), share life advice with everyone in their orbit, closely escape the police as stop drivers through scenes of hunting and narrow orbite will be finals that will be anything that will be anything. In the background of their incessant journey are the glorious Venetian plains, landscapes and colonies which seem to be stuck in a transitional space, like Carlobianchi and Doriano, somewhere between urban and pastoral.
The most intelligent thing that an old person (uh) can do is to transmit their wisdom won to young people. Although Carlobianchi and Doriano often find it difficult to remember the lessons they learned and the revelations on which they landed (they constantly drink, after all), they do exactly this by taking under their wing the young Giulio (Filippo Scotti), an architecture student whose drift and intrigue.
Although more agile and adventurous in its structure from the start, “The Last One For the Road” assumes a more conventional tone while the trio is associated through a road trip, but harmless. The reflective themes with which the film have played with gradually also reduce a touch – it seems rather banal when the film devotes a lot of time to the older duo advising Giulio on women, which ends up connecting to it. The smile entrusted until then shy Giulio is carrying on his face accordingly is also cliché.
Beautifully shot on the film, “The Last One For the Road” still has a lot to offer elsewhere, in particular in the representation of Sossai of different architectural structures during the road trio of the central trio. Modern residences and buildings enrich the impromptu and varied itinerary of the characters, and some cases inspired by inventive flashbacks that have coded the past and the current cinema plume. Meanwhile, the effortless rhythms of the script recall the conversational films of Richard Linklater with characters binding organically and expressing their mind. (An idiotic observation on which could have invented the shrimp cocktail is particularly funny with a nostalgic wink in the 90s.) When it all begins to feel a little repetitive, a suspicion of suspense raises the film with the trio which associates with a little idiot while sipping the lucidic daiquiris.
You do not leave “the last for the road” with the feeling that you saw something original affirming life. But there is still a feeling of disarming comfort in the earth-to-earth behavior of the film, and the gratifying arc so predictable by Giulio. In one of the many scenes from the film, Carlobianchi and Doriano have ice cream in a flavor that they did not intend to eat, anticipating a bitter taste, but obtaining something sweet instead. At that time, they could also talk about the aromas of their own lives, but upside down. And it is the spirit of “the last for the road” in a word: eager to nourish his audience something sweet when everything else seems to be bitter.
