Call him Nostos. The name of the ancient Greek who attempts to make his way home after many, many years at war in Franco Piavoli’s astonishing Nostos: Il Ritomo means homecoming. Call him Odysseus if you like, or Ulysses.
Nostos’s single-minded aspiration to get home accounts for the film’s unity; its continuity, though, is in disarray, in pieces, conveying what war has done to the soldier’s spirit. A tremendous storm wrecks the ship carrying Nostos and surviving comrades. Or Nostos was the sole survivor among his group of middle-aged warriors, the storm perhaps being an image, a symbol, of a war that can never be left behind. Piavoli, who cinematographed and edited, cuts from the storm to a solitary Nostos on land. Nostos howls with grief for his lost comrades. A beautiful young woman swims naked; they make love. Do they? Isn’t Nostos alone on that island (as the establishing extreme overhead long-shot suggests)? Isn’t the girl a fantasy recollecting his Penelope at the age when he left her to go to war? We see Nostos floating in the sea, struggling to reach home. (At one point, he appears to be swimming across a gigantic moon.) But isn’t this emblematic of his endurance of what war demanded of him? As he floats, memories interrupt—for instance, of childhood, of a child pursuing an endlessly rolling hoop. When, having washed ashore, Nostos is at last home, the hoop rolls into the frame and finally comes to rest.
Piavoli doesn’t show the couple reuniting. Instead, Nostos’s wife is shown in long-shot, waiting. The couple’s separation, the passage of time, and Nostos’s experience of war—a form of exile—have made them different persons than when they were lovers long ago. Not all gulfs can be bridged.
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Dennis Grunes 