Nessun Dolore review – sketchy Roman fable of liberal white guilt

There is some incidental interest and the film is beautifully shot, but finally it buckles under the weight of its own preposterousness and naivety. It is also sketchy about how and why people go into and come out of prison; the final shot, a supposedly heartwarming visionary moment of redemption and reconciliation, looks absurd.

Davide is a secondhand book dealer with a little-visited stall: who on earth reads books nowadays? He is played by Alessandro Borghi with something of that troubled decency that Peter Sarsgaard often projects. Evidently, Davide has got enough family money (and a handsome book-lined flat) that he doesn’t have to worry about sales. He flirts with a literature professor (Valeria Golino) but doesn’t quite have the maturity to pursue a relationship.

Davide’s world falls apart one day when he is approached in the street by a north African man (Ramzi Lafrindi) – perhaps a migrant or asylum seeker – hand-in-hand with a nine-year-old boy (Beidja Yahiaoui), whom he is clearly trying to be rid of. This man shoves the small boy into Davide’s arms, insisting that he is Davide’s responsibility.

Is he? Or is this a desperate stratagem on the man’s part, gambling that there are enough white men nursing guilty sexual secrets for this ruse to have a chance of succeeding? Either way, the kid follows the increasingly alarmed Davide around, until he furiously orders the boy to back off, which he does, off the pavement, with terrible results.

From there, Davide embarks on an odyssey of guilt and shame, red-pilled by his close encounter with poverty, his eyes opened to cruelty and racism, visiting the shantytown quarters where poor migrants are to be found and makes a muddied and disastrous attempt to open his heart and his flat.

It is a bold and interesting high-concept premise – though audiences might have been expecting more twists and turns in the narrative. In the end, the film settles for a placid sense of personal unhappiness and self-forgiveness on the hero’s part, which supersedes any larger sense of poverty or injustice in society.

Nessun Dolore screened at the Venice film festival.