Thank You Guys

An actor past his time can no longer get work. He lives on voiceovers for advertisements. A friend brings him an offer: to teach drama to prisoners. He takes it because there is nothing else. There are five or six men in the class and none of them is interested. Then he finds a text: Waiting for Godot. The subject of the play, waiting for someone who will not come, lands directly on the prisoners. Rehearsals begin and the group starts to take it seriously. Riccardo Milani directs. Antonio Albanese takes the lead, with Fabrizio Bentivoglio and Sonia Bergamasco in the cast. The film is a remake of a French production from 2020, which itself came from a real case: a director in Sweden staged Godot with prisoners and most of the cast absconded during the tour. The subject is not theatre but standing. On stage the prisoners are applauded for the first time, and that is something separate from their sentences; the film gives it without sentiment. Beckett's text has a function inside the narrative; that the play is about waiting matches the sentence itself directly. Antonio Albanese is known in Italy as a comedian and the part here is measured. Its limit is formula; the narrative runs on a familiar line and the ending stands in the shadow of the earlier version. Who it is for: viewers who like contemporary Italian comedy and prison narratives. Who it is not for: being a remake it is not original, the emotional register rises, and some of the characters are thin.