Twenty-five years ago he came out Ray of light, the album that gave Madonna irrevocable icon status. The album concludes with “Mear Girl,” a song in which the pop star sings, “I escaped from my house that does not contain me / from the man that I cannot keep / from my mother who haunts me even though she is gone.” About his parents, about the shock of the death of his mother and his distant father, about the unbridgeable distance between parents and children. Madonna also returns to the theme in “Mother and Father” (from American life) where he sings “I swore I would never need anyone else / I turned my heart into a cage / A victim of some kind of rage.” Andrew Hay's new movie strangers, With Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, in Italian cinemas from February 29, the film sets out on the same path, impenetrable, dark and haunting. author seekafter weekend And 45 yearsHe returns to the big screen with the story of isolation, the leitmotif of his poetry. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Taichi Yamada — an award-winning Japanese author beloved by Bret Easton Ellis — it moves the events from 1980s Tokyo to contemporary London, placing an odd couple searching for solace at the center.

London, Adam (Andrew Scott) is a screenwriter who lives in a brand new condominium, still practically uninhabited, a silent and isolated place. One evening, one of the building's few tenants, Harry (Paul Mescal, the most famous figure in Irish cinema), knocks on his door, offers him some Japanese liquor and offers himself for some company. He's drunk and clearly shaken. Adam, partly out of mistrust and partly out of shyness, declines her invitation to spend the evening together, and closes the door. And so begins a story of ghosts, lost embraces, regret and healing.

The two meet again in the following days on the stairs of the building, and a relationship begins that pushes Adam to open up about his past, and to give voice to that weight that oppresses him, that does not allow him to live: the death of his parents. He was in a car accident when he was 12 years old. Returning to visit the family home in south London, the protagonist also finds his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), sees them again, and talks to them. trust. A confrontation ensues that forces him to address the traumas that have ridiculed him since that fatal moment, and that have made him incapable of love. As the story continues with Harry, visits and conversations with his parents continue as well, and Adam updates them on his life and work, and heads out. The mother accepts it with difficulty, but the father already knows this, she tells him, leaving tears of guilt for not being able to console him in difficult moments. As the story unfolds, the levels of reality and the interior, the level of the present and the past, blend between confessions and mutual accusations, and close negotiations between feelings of guilt, abandonment and surrender. In this story of urban alienation, Hay gives (cinematic) form to solid, tangible isolation, superimposing ghostly and material presence, placing the bodies of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal at the center of the narrative, who seek each other out, and use each other. , exploring each other, welcoming each other.

The apartment standing alone on the horizon, dominates a panorama that seems as distant and intangible as that Shivering (David Cronenberg) e sliver (Philip Noyce) The scenario becomes an astronomical vacuum, where the white noise of traffic and the city – which arises from it but is isolated from it – seems distant, muffled, in a science-fiction atmosphere, as if the protagonists were living in a spaceship launched into the void. The shock of mourning crystallized the moment of loss within the protagonist, giving form to a present of constant terror and isolation. Around this the director presents a psychological melodrama (Lacanian, for those who want to go a little further) in which the form of classical cinema collapses to make way for postmodern cinematic forms. Andrew Hay can be seen, in this sense, as a contemporary Douglas Sirk, equally concerned with the dynamics of distance, with those forces (social, emotional, psychological) that push people apart from each other, that create couples (lovers, parents, children, husband and wife) with dispensation and an emptiness impossible to heal. Strangers Therefore, it starts from the “simple” love story from which it begins. The dialectic of romance here is a MacGuffin to give the protagonist the opportunity to crystallize his perception of himself in relation to the reality that he created for himself in order to escape the inevitable. The burden of reality, in a therapeutic discourse built on invisible but deeply rooted scars, must be expelled and healed.

As Federico Di Chio wrote Hard illusion. Cinema and television series in an era of disillusionment (Pompiani), “Perhaps we must enter the inner cave, with an endless descent, and advance between shadows and lights, until we hear labored breathing, fluttering, murmurs, and echoes; Suddenly we are haunted by screams, convulsions, sobs, screams, and hysterical laughter; And then, as we continue down along the walls covered in childish graffiti, we come to a silent sanctuary in which there is a blind, sovereign, indifferent little idol… We must go into the world of the condition, the world of monsters and demons and clowns of cruelty and poetry to give meaning to everyday life. […]The British director, who takes us into this “inner cave”, manages to accompany us on a very personal yet universal journey, in a ghostly melody where the path of psychoanalysis comes to the surface, dialogue after dialogue, confrontation after confrontation, as the only path. Towards acceptance, Pain, self and others, ends with the abandonment of illusory reality (consoling, soothing, protecting but numbing), in favor of embracing reality, with all the baggage of suffering that can make it unsustainable, heartbreaking, but alive, pulsating, luminous even in the dark constellation of pain.

Once the tangle in which he has locked himself is unraveled, after a new loss, once again brought to the surface, Adam extracts from himself the promise of freedom, like the Madonna of the breathless, ceaseless rush of “Mer Girl” (“I ran and I ran, still I'm running away ) comes to terms with a covenant of independence from love dictated by anger over an unfair and heartbreaking loss, and acceptance of the possibility of a new feeling (“I gotta give it up / Find someone to love me”). We are strangers to love because the mere possibility of losing it, not deserving it, or not knowing how to develop it throws us into the darkest of frustrations, makes us defenseless and vulnerable. In this panorama where loneliness is the habit of survival, Hay's new cinema is a call to surrender.