The Last Human (L’Ultimo Terrestre), review

What do you expect if you meet an alien civilization? And above all what do they find landing in Italy?

Gian Alfonso Pacinotti, a famous cartoonist knows as Gipi, starts out is direction career by adapting for the cinema, the graphic novel “Nobody hurts me” by Giacomo Monti (Canicola). At the eve of the landing of the alien on earth, in a little Tuscan city, people started to ask how do their life will change. Will they arrive to steal our work? Will they be good or bad with us? For Luca (Gabriele Spinelli), a man with huge problems of relation, it doesn’t matter. But the arrivals of the aliens, slowly will be the event that will change his life.

In a world that lost all hopes, empty and motionless, that waits for something, populated by petty-minded men, Luca can’t established what is good and what is wrong. He was abandoned by his mother when he was a child and this event create a childlike hate for women, reflection of his father hate. He is rounded by freaky people,who obviously are able to terrible cruelness. The friendship with Roberta (Luca Marinelli), a transsexual who knows him from the childhood, is the only true moment of humanity. Paralyzed from the fear of life, Luca is a character unable to action, or unable to take a decision, who dreams to approach with his neighbor Anna (Anna Bellato). In a rotten and sluggish reality, the only hope for a change seems the messianic coming of the aliens.

A new gaze on our society, different in Italy, maybe unique. An aware direction and totally in the service of the story, who can change one’s tune with the proper ease of who knows very well how to do a direction. Gipi weighs carefully each elements, by choosing with care, the right framing which it’s able to tell each moment of the story, finding the right distance in order to observe Luca‘s walking on earth. A film that at the 68° Venice Film Festival arrives surprising for his originality and completeness. A certainty and maturity who goes over the beginning. A real discordant note.