The Brooklyn Rail

An “arthouse” “road-trip” “buddy” movie. The adjectives already widely applied to Francesco Sossai’s The Last One for the Road suggest a decidedly hybrid film. They are not inaccurate. To their multiplicity we might add the more high-flown genres of the picaresque and the Bildungsfilm (coming of age). For, its three central protagonists differ significantly in temperament and trajectory, from the two roguish and affable middle-aged men, Carlobianchi and Doriano, to Giulio, the Neapolitan architectural student whom they befriend and help to “come of age” with encouragement both sentimental and sexual. By turns hard-bitten and caricatural, the lessons they teach their young charge occasionally brush up against the cliché. Yet the film’s peculiar mix of cynicism and insouciance, along with some striking cinematography, rescue it from platitude.

Once a prodigious engine of the country’s manufacturing economy and made-in-Italy trade—with an attendant (and often insufferable) nouveau riche—the Veneto province’s late twentieth-century boom has tended toward a protracted bust since 2008. Half-built houses and ubiquitous “for rent” signs speak as poignantly as any character to that lingering disaffection. Alcohol serves as a temporary balm. The film’s English title evokes the last drinks of the night that its protagonists keep vowing to grab. By contrast, its original Italian Le città di pianura [The cities of the plain] speaks more matter-of-factly to the film’s geographical realities—the lowland terra firma sprawling west from the Venetian lagoon—and hence to the sociological specificity of its underemployed subjects.

The film opens with a helicopter ride by two industrial representatives, immersed in inane and banal banter. Their almost absurd landing in a dusty patch of a small northern town inevitably recalls (and travesties) the initial sequence of La Dolce Vita. If the helicopter traversing Rome’s skyline epitomized the economic “miracle” of the late 1950s that Federico Fellini’s film mordantly examined, one hovers here with comparable, and knowing, acerbity. The factory envoys touch down outside a factory to fête an elderly worker, Primo Sossai, on the day of his retirement (that he shares the director’s last name can be no coincidence). They summarily offer the unsuspecting Primo a quick gulp of champagne and an inscribed Rolex watch, in recognition of his many years’ commitment to the company “family.” They beat a quick return to their helicopter after a hasty, patronizing speech in front of Primo’s co-workers, including a man (Genio) who throws a duffel bag in his car and leaves with a look of vague disdain. He will resurface as one of the film’s key figures, central as much for his absence as for his imminent return.

The rest of the plot takes place years after Genio has departed Italy for self-imposed exile in Argentina. It falls to Carlobianchi and Doriano, his friends and former colleagues, to relate his story. Much of the film revolves around their aborted effort to pick Genio up from the airport after many years away. Their confusion as to precisely which airport he is flying into forms the subject of some Laurel and Hardy style hijinks. But it is the matter of Genio’s expatriation, and how it bears upon their own lives, which anchors the plot and its pathos.

So too does their friendship and its shared woes—a fraternity quickly extended to the young Giulio, whom they meet one night while carousing in Venice. Celebrating the recent graduation of a fellow female student—on whom he has an undeclared crush—the lovelorn Giulio finds solace in the errant chatter and drunken conviviality of Doriano and Carlobianchi. Shared in a cozy local bar where a young man strums wistful guitar tunes, their intertwined life’s stories remain bound with that of the mythical Genio—who came from one of the last local farming communities and whose father was crushed by a tractor decades ago. A number of flashbacks stitch together the story of their friendship with Genio.

The three men, Carlobianchi and Doriano tell Giulio, had years ago collected sunglasses discarded from the assembly line at their factory, selling them illegally to the local community. As the ringleader of this black market operation, Genio left before he could be targeted by the authorities, erasing any traces which could inculpate his mates. Carlobianchi and Doriano have long since spent the extra money they earned on various expenses, family, and personal indulgences. Carlobianchi has fallen on such hard times that he now lives back with his parents. But Genio buried his treasure before leaving. Its location remains the stuff of legend. While listening to his new companions’ tale, Giulio imagines himself as a younger Genio. This sequence forms one of the film’s most interesting gambits, and shrewdly evokes how we often project ourselves onto the stories we hear.

An unplanned side quest (“divine providence,” Doriano calls it) takes the protagonists to a rundown sixteenth-century villa. They manage to trick its handsome aristocratic owner into believing that Giulio is the young architect with whom he had previously spoken and asked to help detail the environmental hazards that a proposed local highway would pose to the property’s cultural patrimony. A spontaneous and furtive make-out scene between the count and Carlobianchi at one point adds little to the plot, except as an absurdity or convoluted allegory. To be sure, Carlobianchi later inexplicably cuddles Doriano as they lay in bed one morning, hungover, after his girlfriend has departed. In light of their seemingly inveterate heterosexuality—including a female prostitute whom they introduce to Giulio—such acts come across as gratuitous or pandering. Far more interesting are passing encounters, such as when Carlobianchi runs into the retired Primo alone in a bar, still wearing his company Rolex. He barely looks up from the video gambling machine into which he stares blankly.

Yet the film’s real heart emerges from the characters’ caprices—by turns endearing and annoying—and the meandering conversations that often accompany them, consistently set to the same plaintive guitar music they first heard together in the bar. At one point, Giulio proposes a visit to the Brion tomb—a family burial ground near Treviso, designed by the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa. Explaining the site’s volumes and structures, Giulio explains to his new friends that it is less a tomb than “a machine for processing grief.” Carlobianchi and Doriano offer less erudite lessons. But it is their encouragement which prods Giulio to pluck up the courage, finally, to contact his crush, making a date to give her the graduation gift that he was reluctant to deliver. “We know fuck all,” Doriano tells Giulio toward the film’s end, “but we know everything.” In that quip lies the film’s bittersweet charm, an alchemy of melancholic resignation and jovial dignity.