“Feeling Better”: Venice Review | Reviews

Director: Valerio Mastandrea. Italy. 2024. 92 minutes

Italian audiences have long had a soft spot for Valerio Mastandrea, a Roman actor in the tradition of Alberto Sordi with a world-weary, run-of-the-mill face that can go from comic to melancholy in the blink of an eye. In his second film as a director, selected to open the parallel Horizons section in Venice, Mastandrea makes full use of his stubbly charm and makes a playful attempt to make us believe in a hospital-set romantic comedy in which all the major characters are in a coma.

Poignant and silly at the same time

Poignant and silly at the same time, Feel better has its poignant moments, but never fills out its bold premise with much more than existential meandering, classic rom-com tropes, and some cool overhead camera angles. But with its likable happy-sad soundtrack by Icelandic composer Toti Gudnason (the lamb) and good timing in the zeitgeist – in our fragile post-pandemic times, where love and mortality are closely intertwined – Feel better could at least appeal to local audiences. It is certainly more commercial than the experienced actor’s directorial debut from 2018, the small, dark drama Drive (She laughs), which also dealt with the end-of-life issue in a way that exceeded all expectations.

There, the targeted orthodoxy was that a young woman would inevitably collapse at her husband’s funeral. Here, it’s about the belief that we should be happy when someone awakes from a coma. Mastandrea and co-author Enrico Audenino imagine a world in which coma patients outside their bodies roam hospital corridors in a twilight state, walk the streets, hang out in parks, and even sign up for organized bus tours. What if they were happier there? What if they fell in love with one of the other “sleepers” and were afraid of exactly what all their friends and relatives desperately want—that they would return to consciousness, to a world that the non-comatose insist on being the real world?

Feel better goes the way of many such high-premise exercises: after an initial sugar rush of joy, it wades through the syrup of actually having to invent a story. A thrilling musical-style opening sequence brings the gradual realization that the suited, tieless and unshaven 50-year-old Roman played by Mastandrea (none of the main characters have names) is in fact the out-of-body avatar of a coma patient, whom he observes from his own hospital bed with a mixture of concern and disgust.

Like the other coma patients he interacts with irritably – Lino Mustella’s good-natured klutz, Laura Morante’s sarcastic, bitter ward veteran – he is invisible to the hospital’s visitors, nurses and doctors. When his comatose alter ego is thrown from his room into the basement to make way for a new arrival, played with warmth and sensitivity by Argentine actress Dolores Fonzi, they engage in a furious standoff with Mastandrea’s character. So we know where this is going.

One thing Feel better has a deft handling of tone, achieved not only through a script that takes a less-is-more approach to big emotional moments, but also through color-coding and a clever use of natural lighting. The dreary hospital corridors are brightened by orange panels, perhaps suggesting that the people we meet here are stuck on traffic-light yellow. Alongside Gudnason’s more sweet than bitter soundtrack, enough existing tracks are used to create a soundtrack album – most jarringly in the case of T. Rex’s overused “Cosmic Dancer.” There are even some expensive-looking special effects related to the howling storm these half-living people feel when someone is dying.

Good, but forgettable, Feel better could attract a few distributors outside Italy and could even get a streaming slot for “alternative romantic comedies” in world cinema. However, one would like to see the Italian title, Nonostantecould have been translated more literally. “Regardless” would fit the story perfectly.