Francesco Sossai’s new film is not one that recognises the spoilsport clinical concept of “alcoholism”. Rather, it is the cynically amused and lenient witness to drunkenness, bleariness, sadness and intermittent nausea; to the tragicomic optimism of ageing boozers, ruined romantics with a superhuman ability to keep imbibing throughout the day, always wanting just one last drink, and then one last drink after that in the hope that elusive happiness will finally arrive. Either that, or they hope that liquor will accelerate the arrival of some wisdom that can never arrive. Pointedly, the film begins and ends with the same deadpan gag when someone, on the point of permanent farewell, shouts a crucial piece of life advice that is bewilderingly inaudible.
It is a road movie, a buddy movie and a faintly baffling shaggy-dog tale; a coming-of-age story that embraces infantilism and not coming of age; a bittersweet comedy without the sweet. It is intensely depressing yet funny at the same time. Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) and Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) are two middle-aged wasters who are always amiably drunk, living hand-to-mouth, evidently on the fringes of petty crime and living in the luxurious car they bought with their share of a scam set up some time ago by their buddy Genio (Andrea Pennacchi). This involved Genio stealing designer glasses and sunglasses made at the factory that employed him and, with Doriano and Carlobianchi, selling them on at knockdown prices.
We first see Genio sneaking out of a retirement party at this very factory where the bosses arrive by helicopter; the scene is perhaps designed to recall Fellini, although a less Fellini-esque helicopter ride can hardly be imagined. The event is for an ageing employee called Primo Sossai, who later in the story makes an enigmatic return. This whole film is perhaps a gossiped-about urban legend within the director’s own family.
Genio finally had to flee the country to evade the cops and is now apparently returning to Venice where Doriano and Carlobianchi hope for a reunion, but a bizarre blunder means they miss him. This is incidentally a very unsentimental view of Venice, with a brief glimpse of the Santa Croce district and a scene outside the world’s most unglamorous travel hub: Venice Treviso, Italy’s equivalent of Luton airport.
In the course of bumbling around tipsily, they meet a young architecture student, Giulio (Filippo Scotti), who is poignantly and unrequitedly in love with another student – something that our two ravaged non-heroes shrewdly sense. The entire movie is Giulio exasperatedly agreeing to hang out with these two outrageous losers, and he takes them to an architectural marvel: the postmodernist Brion tomb near Treviso, designed by Carlo Scarpa, whose distinctive concrete forms are a meditation on death. Is that what this film’s characters are finally doing?
Maybe. Perhaps the point is that Doriano and Carlobianchi heal Giulio’s romantic pain, although it could be that his love is in any case not quite as unrequited as all that. Giulio has been their real buddy, their real third musketeer, when Genio proved himself a less than satisfactory friend. It’s a likable movie that follows its nose, mooching around like a drunk in the afternoon.
• The Last One for the Road is in UK and Irish cinemas from 10 July.
