Luca Bertossi | Bittersweet Rainbow – Homecoming / 2021

return to truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luca Bertossi (screenplay, with revisions by Lorenzo Di Lello, supervised by Emiliano Grisostolo) Luca Bertossi (director) Bittersweet Rainbow – Homecoming / 2021 [24 minutes]

 

At the beginning of Italian director Luca Bertossi’s short film Bittersweet Rainbow Claudio (Leonardo de Simone) returns at age 24 to his small Italian village after 7 years absence with the realization that everything changes, particularly people.

     Actually, he is talking more about himself than the others he finds still living in his isolated homeland, his mother (Sara Alzetta)—who has recently suffered her husband’s death—and his friend Sara (Elisbetta Cancelli), who bemoans the fact that nearly all of her own friends have left and never returned even for a visit.

     She asks Claudio why he left, but he doesn’t openly respond, simply saying “I forget.”

     But as he re-wanders the lanes and streets of his childhood, we soon learn of his sexual relations with Nicolò (Michele Masci), a truly beautiful young man who is desperately in love with Claudio and wants to share the fact with the world. The only problem, the major problem, is that Claudio is terrified of people, particularly, his mother discovering the fact that he is gay, and refuses to even discuss the inevitable, which Nicolò describes, “It cannot stay a secret forever. Sooner or later, someone will discover it.”

 

     Yet we quickly realize, Claudio is a coward and refuses to even seriously discuss coming out. The two argue on a drive back from a party during a rainy night, ending in an automobile accident which kills Nicolò. His guilt and his continued cowardice has clearly driven Claudio off.

      But now, back to face the memories, he spends a tear-filled night recalling the events, returning in the morning to tell his mother the truth, to finally admit his hidden sexuality after all these years.

      This might almost appear to be an inane story, but Bertossi’s beautifully shot scenes, his evocation of the farmland and home in which Claudio grew up, and the simply beauty of the two central actors of this film turn it into something very special. Little things in this film come to be

of great significance: his mother getting up early to make his waffles which as a child he loved, but which he now no longer eats; a quiet moment after he and has mother have reunited in which she suddenly breaks down in tears both for the joy of his return and the remembrance of his having left without explanation. It is indeed “sentimental,” but in a manner that is so honest and tender that one doesn’t mind having one’s heart tugged, realizing once more the dilemmas of so many young men and women who find it difficult to deal with the reality of their differences, often ending, unfortunately, in tragic results.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).