The plongée longtake of the wonderful opening credits – undoubtedly among the most beautiful seen in recent Italian cinema – fatally observing from above a Milan as fascinating as it is gloomy and spectral, is already an evident declaration, if not of intent, at least of feelings. The tense gait of the extraordinary musical theme by Santi Pulvirenti tells us this and the title also tells us: what we will soon see will be the story of a last night, a terminus, the end – of a very honorable career or of a lifetime -, a point and never again. A motionless race towards the end of darkness, a mocking stumble a few hours from the finish line, Milan which in losing (the) Love will probably also lose the last bulwark of justice, honesty and loyalty that it had left. In that aerial view therefore, the omnipotence of a silent destiny that watches over a city, the frightening entry into a world – and therefore into a type – governed by its own laws, by very black codes capable of crushing anyone; even the righteous, weak in everyone’s eyes because they never fired; even those who are full of love.
After two films with a blatantly international cast and ambitions (Escobar with Benicio del Toro and The Informer with Rosamund Pike, Clive Owen, Ana De Armas), Andrea Di Stefano finally looks to Italy, hiring the best and most popular Italian actor of the period to make him duet with an extraordinary Linda Caridi – women whose determination acts as a counterpoint to the alleged weakness of her husband: excellent writing and chemistry between the two – and returns to that Milan which in the gray 70s had been the ideal stage for the noirs of Fernando Di Leo and Umberto Lenzi. Yet no The Last Night of Love there is no trace of that violence, of that dirty and furious staging that characterized the poliziottesco; as we said, that generic and invincible sense of defeat and existential stalemate typical of noir persists, but the greatness of the film also lies in the extraordinary geometries drawn within the few spaces in which the action develops, in a narrative architecture who masterfully uses time to compress events and reverse situations (the party) and in a highly calibrated construction of images, where shadows and chiaroscuro are always significant and coherent elements, never gratuitously aestheticizing. Just think of the wonderful finale, in which it will be a shadow (real? imagined? symbolic?) to sanction the end of the race, or the long and exciting sequence of transport on the motorway, when the imminent threat passes through the subjective evaluation of the gaze , however multiplied and fragmented by the insistence on rear-view mirrors.
In short, Di Stefano does not look superficially at the past, he does not trivially redo the genre, rather he evokes it, or rather, evokes a feeling, an approach, a desire, to then make it more current and contemporary than ever. It is a film of today and about today, The Last Night of Lovenot because he is interested in saying great things about this present (perhaps he does too, but thank God he is never the ultimate engine of the action), but because he finally speaks, communicates, excites, exalts, entertains with today’s images, present, urban, metropolitan, very black. Without the sterility of the copy, without any vilification of cadaverous images and intentions of the past, without the urgency of social denunciation at all costs. In the most popular local production, perhaps we need to go back to the beautiful Subura of Sollima, to rediscover an equally fideistic, passionate and contemporary adherence to the codes of the genre, a look equally eager to tell before saying.
That’s love: for the genre, for the images, for the cinema.