Sweet Dreams

Massimo is nine years old the night his mother dies. He is told it was a heart attack and nobody tells him anything else. The boy grows up, becomes a journalist, reports from wars and begins having panic attacks. In his forties, back to sell the family flat, he learns what he did not know about that night. The subject is not grief but a lie being carried for thirty years. Everyone around him knew the truth and all of them chose silence; the film presents this not as cruelty but as the reflex of a period and a milieu. The form moves back and forth in time without explaining its transitions. The childhood passages are warm and close, the adult ones cold; Marco Bellocchio joins them without cutting and sometimes places them side by side in the same room. The source is Massimo Gramellini's book about his own life. It had sold heavily in Italy so the story was already known; the film's job is not to reveal the event but to show the weight carried. Valerio Mastandrea plays the adult Massimo and Bérénice Bejo the doctor. The film opened the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2016. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian drama and narratives built on childhood trauma. Who it is not for: anyone bored by low tempo; the film is long and repetitive.