Francesco Sossai’s The Last One for the Road, which premiered last year at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, can easily be described as a tale of friendship. It also belongs to the lineage of road movies that extends as old as cinema as mass entertainment. From the group of bus passengers singing in Frank Capra’s rom-com It Happened One Night to the dislocated hitchhiker in Detour to the two generations of men racing in Two Lane Blacktop to the camping trip of two old friends drifting apart in Old Joy, the landscapes host a multitude of human experiences. Men’s affinity for the road seem to lie in the hope for the unknown – escaping the permanence of place and hoping further down the road, comraderie will be reemerge, solitude, existential crisis, and pessimism will be reconciled, and perhaps, like the frontier men in those Westerns set in the 19th century – times when systems were less concrete and more mobile – wealth and romance will be discovered.
In Francesco Sossai’s vision for the road movie, where the trio – two men in their 50s, Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) and Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) and the young architect Giulio (Filippo Scotti) – drives across the Venetian Plains, the two older men are also on the road in search of hope, which paradoxically lies in the act of moving backwards in time. In the opening scene, after establishing shots showing swaths of crimson neon lights reflecting off buildings in the nocturnal scene, the camera finds Carlobianchi and Doriano in their car, drunk, on the verge of passing out, uttering, “once upon a time…” The movie suddenly transitions to an anecdote of a retired pilot receiving a Medal of Service. The brightly lit scenery and comedic undertone contrast with the nocturnal and enervated opening scene. The flashback will be mostly neglected by the movie that follows, except for the final image of their friend putting a bag in a trunk and departing. This image is what the two men, along with their young acquaintance, chase throughout the rest of the film. Their hope for the road is thus to rediscover a long-gone image in their head.
The old friend from that image left for Argentina decades ago, and tonight Carlobianchi and Doriano plan to pick him up from the airport. After waking up in the car, they end up at another bar and decide to have one last drink of the night next to an airport named Venice, not to be mistaken for the tourist destination. Through the conversations, we get that this is just another night, another bar, another drink for the two. We have no idea how long Carlobianchi has worn that leather jacket, or Doriano with his suit, but we sense the habitual behaviours, like those memories and regrets that keep flashing back on late nights.
The two old men reminisce and romanticize the past. A persistent insinuation in their speech is that what they once found beautiful is now lost or eroded – how “the 90s were great” and how everything was put on hold by the financial crisis in 2008. The legalization of prostitution in the past acts as a literal and mental image for the two to remember their friendship by.
The scenarios Sossai introduces to the film don’t intrude on the nostalgic atmosphere imposed by the two older men either. When we first meet Giulio, his prudishness is the first impression: he forfeits a romantic opportunity with a crush because he has to wake up early the next morning, and the film lets that impression carry over into the rest of the film. The contrasting personalities between the two older men and Giulio take center stage in the drama. The three develop their bonds more through their encounters with exogenous factors, such as sites and people, than by figuring out their differences amongst themselves. Once the journey begins, Giulio seemingly forgets and abandons his previous obligations, and no conflicts or consequences are raised regarding them. An issue can be taken with how much of a cipher Giulio is. He seems primarily a device for the two older men to insert their wisdom and ideals of freedom, and he offers no counter-wisdom or contradictions to their beliefs.
The film is slight, as there is never really a significant burst of conflict. Sossai is perfectly content to have the film exist in the brief table-conversation scenes and small interactions between the characters. It can be easily broken into loosely organized chapters. The camera placements during the conversation scenes varied, times where people are framed extremely close to a point of squeezing their face directly into it and times of discomfort. There are wide shots of the three navigating the streets, where the architecture gives room to show their beauty. There are inspired lighting choices. Especially when early in the film, when the two old men speed and escape from the traffic police, the car is mostly dark, but a few natural light sources ignite certain parts of their faces as they discuss their old age and admit that there are certain things they may never get to do ever, their loss of ability to make promises to themselves as time goes by.
As a lover of cinema about sad old men myself, the movie never reaches a point where I can fully identify with their emotions or with the depression from the gradual erosion of the landscape. There also seems to be an aesthetic sheen covering the core of those emotions, like the jagged guitar music that accompanies many scenes. The music bridges over scenes that are supposed to be lonely. Sossai’s imagination, when reminiscing about the past, remains quite strained, especially with whippan transitions in flashbacks, as if the characters were in a Scorsese film. But those moments never convey a proper sense of space that would allow the two men’s nostalgia to register in filmic form. No wonder the best scene in the film is near the end, without music, when the three visit the Brion Tomb, designed by Carlo Scarpa. A profound intimacy washes over the film precisely because it slows down and settles into a calmer spatial register, with wide shots and diegetic sound that allow the location details to speak for themselves. This is also the closest Carlobianchi and Doriano are to the end of their roads.
I feel a deep connection with Marco Ferreri, Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi, Carlo Lizzani, and with a whole tradition of Italian cinema that had the power to penetrate reality and portray it poetically, yet without illusion. When I watch their films, I can’t help but feel they were speaking directly to their time, with clarity and depth. That’s the kind of cinema I would like to make: a cinema capable of looking squarely at the present. – Francesco Sossai
We are a little over a quarter of the way into the 21st century now. The gradual erosion of urbanization and capitalism has led people to cast a more melancholic eye on the older surrounding landmarks, as the next moment, they may no longer exist. The Last One for the Road has the consistent feeling of impotence – the inability to look at a landscape for one last time and have it last forever, and the inability to keep things the way they were, so self-sustained living becomes existing within a bubble; perhaps that’s why the score keeps playing over many scenes. The film seems to be aware of this sense of impotence. Narratively, a MacGuffin involving that old friend who ran off to Argentina resolves in an unexpected way that puts everything into sobering perspective. However, it’s not eager to settle into a mode of enervation either. As the movie continues to show the two older men with quirky and uplifting manners, it indicates that the smaller joys and victories, like convincing a younger guy to get the girl, deserve celebration over the larger defeat. The beauty of the last drink is how we never need to think it’s the last in the moment.
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