Director – Francesco Sossai – 2025 – Italy – Cert. 15 – 100m
****
Two older men travel around Italy by car, constantly stopping for “a last one for the road”, joined by a young architecture student – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 10th
Night. Two men passed out in a car. A voiceover relates a local myth, shown to us in flashback as he describes it. On the day that Primo (Gianni Da Re) retires from the workforce, he is taken aside by officials and… presented with a gift from the company president (Roberto Citran from Conclave, Edward Berger, 2024; The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story, Peter Greenaway, 2003; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, John Madden, 2001) who flies in by helicopter. As the latter leaves, he tells Primo the secret of life, but his words are lost in the noise of the ‘copter blades. At the back, a figure leaves.
In the car, moustache wakes up. It’s still dark. Dori (Pierpaulo Capovilla) is still out. They wake. The go for a last one for the road. Moustache, who is Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano), can’t remember what it was he was saying. It’s gone. It was something important. Also there’s something odd about the beer. Turns out it’s non-alcoholic, because the cafe can’t sell alcoholic at this time of night. They have to pick up a friend from the airport. But first, one last drink. Elsewhere. Because non-alcoholic doesn’t count.
Much of the driving takes place at night, with windscreen point of view shoots speeding rapidly down Italian country roads. Early on, our pair are spotted by speed cops, they go into Stealth Mode, i.e. switch off the lights and go down a side road to lose their official pursuers. In addition to the night roads, the narrative is pounctured by visits to various bars, restaurants or clubs for the purpose of another “last one for the road”.
One night, they run into a drunken party of students celebrating the graduation of Giulia Antonia (Giulia Bertasi). Nerdy architecture student Giulio (Filippo Scotti from The Hand of God, Paolo Sorrentino, 2021) fails to give her his present, a book about architect Carlo Scarpa and Brion’s tomb, and doesn’t go with them because he must be up early next morning for his design review. “There’s never another time,” she tells him. The two drag him to the gig where the party have gone, but Giulio resolutely refuses to dance. He spots Giulia Antonia snorting coke in the toilets with a man from their party, but refuses to partake of it with them.
The two guys spot him leaving, and talk him into one last drink. They tell him about their friend Genio (Andrea Pennacchi from Primavera, Damiano Michieletto, 2025) who flies in at 11am, as images continuing the opening, local myth sequence show him leaving the workers’ gathering. He went to Argentina.
They take Giulio home to collect his computer, and he finds them arguing about the airport – they seem to have gone to the wrong one, as there are two near Venice. Since Giulio’s “design review is fucked by now”, the two get him to join them for a meal at Mery’s, who cooks delicious snails.
Distracted by a sign for Brion’s Tomb, he accidentally finds Mery’s. Probing the others about Genio’s role in Argentina, the scam the three were running comes to light, with his two companions having blown their share of the loot on the car and other expenses, while Genio buried his share somewhere. Giulio imagines himself taking Genio’s place taking stolen warehouse spectacles and selling them for cash, the clients including Giulia Antonia.
The girl clearly features high in his plans because the morning after Carlo’s ex Katj (Lorena De March) puts them up for the night he’s on the phone arranging to meet up with Giulia Antonia. This necessitates a car ride to the nearest station to avoid the local branch line.
Before leaving, he takes them to the nearby Brion’s Tomb. When Carlo says the place doesn’t feel like a tomb, Giulio explains it’s rather a machine for processing grief. Even though it’s on top of their home, the other two have never been there before. Giulio wonders how this is possible. As they explain, “we know fuck all, yet we know everything.” Giulio,who has studied the place in books and so forth, has never previously visited, and in his quiet, introverted way is quite overcome by the experience.
Running through the piece is the idea of a revelation as to the meaning of life which, though circumstances, one is unable to hear – be it the helicopter noise at the opening, or the closing of train doors at the end which prevents Giulio hearing Carlo’s words of advice. Elsewhere Carlo can’t remember similar sage advice he gleamed from a dream, and the final image has an ice cream scoop dropped on the highway only to be obliterated by successive, passing car tyres. The revelation is there, and apparently we come across it all the time, yet circumstances prevent us ever finding out.
That’s not all that gets lost. A restaurant’s bachelorette party for Susi (Julia Passini) affords Dori some tasty-looking shrimp cocktail which later makes him throw up, failing to fulfil its promise. Genio is found desperately sledgehammering the cement floor of a recent building development trying to find his buried stash until it’s pointed out to him by Giulio that the foundations have already gone deep. And the two guys only visit Brion’s tomb, right on their doorstep, when outsider Giulio takes them there.
At Carlo’s ex’s place, Carlo’s dad (Francesco Busolin) asks, “Don’t you lot ever grow up?” “We’re too old to grow up,” comes the reply. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what all this is about: two middle-aged men playing at still being young and in both denial and defiance of their true age. Genio’s despair at his pot of gold having vanished is contrasted with Giulio’s youthful optimism.
In the case of the latter, Carlo and Dori “rectify” Giulio’s uptight demeanour by dispatching him for a session with an unseen prostitute named Steffi, and it’s notable that after that sequence, the young man seems much more relaxed and able to get his life together. This works on paper and in the film, yet this device is a construct, a cliché.
It’s a film about men, and the women actually shown range from the vivacious Giulia Antonia, with whom it’s hard to imagine a relationship with the quiet, introverted Giulio working out well, to the more down to earth Ketj who has long since given up on her former husband and his childish ways, but is nevertheless there for him on the rare occasions he appears.
All this adds up to a relaxed, slow-burner of a multiple character study which ultimately gets under your skin with its beguiling charm.
The Last One for the Road is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, July 10th.
Trailer: