The Neighbor

"The Neighbor" (titled "Hotel Milano" in Italy) is a 2023 Italian drama directed by Pasquale Marrazzo. The film centers on a young gay couple, Riki (Michele Costabile) and Luca (Jacopo Costantini), who are deeply in love but face escalating harassment from a group of neo-Nazi neighbors. After a violent assault leaves Luca in a coma, Riki is barred from visiting him in the hospital by Luca's intolerant family. The narrative unfolds through Riki's reflections on their relationship and his personal history, highlighting the pervasive impact of homophobia and intolerance.

While Brokeback Mountain this is not, what we have here is a glimpse of the life experience of our brothers in a modern nation which still has a problematic relationship with queers.

Good intentions but very disjointed plot, unnecessary annoying psychotic diva dramatics on the part of the protagonist Rikki and pent up bursts of irrelevant flashbacks to events that lead to no where. Slow pace is curiously drawn out to insert inane conversations from all characters. Whole movie seems amateurish where audience can't or don't care to engage with any character to empathize with. Each character seems detached from the each other, pansively dragging on with their low energy lives and carrying their own misplaced cross in a crisis moment when tragedy, pain and grief should unite and mend fractures for possible last moments of the aggrieved. Too much tortured souls suitable for therapy sessions but not for a movie worth sitting through. The worst part is the enabling of a very clear and present danger in the story to ballon into a very serious hate crime when simple measures with authorities could have had been easily taken to prevent the obvious inevitable consequences it was heading towards. So much negative deprecating aggression within the supposed nucleus of love by the protagonist but seemingly not doing enough the right things to make anything matter.

The first thing I noticed is that the two main protagonists were just a couple of completely ordinary blokes. They even had little pot bellies. This actually enhanced the film (which needed a boost) as they were more relatable to an audience than the chiselled and handsome characters found in most gay films. It was a good contrast with the main bully who was very attractive as were his yobbish mates, making the point that external beauty isn't necessarily matched by what's in someone's mind.

But everyone here had some sort of problem. Luca's mum was hateful, dad was weak, sister was meek. Riccardo's mum was a drunk, aunt was emotional and uncle was an abuser. There was no light relief in this film.

It actually got to be too relentless, all these disfunctional people. Told in real time as well as in flashback, the film and characters seemed too depressing to relate to. In spite of all the emoting, the film didn't get to me.

The final scene involving undressing in the hospital was over the top and I found it far fetched and distasteful. And why wasn't Luca's head shaved?

I watched it all but there are better things for others to see.

This is an apparently low budget Italian film that tries to use flashbacks to try and tell a story, but fails in the process. The script is nonsensical and the scenes randomly stuck together, with the flashbacks stuck between to try and explain a confusing narrative. The dialog is sparse, replaced instead by the actors wandering about and staring vacuously into space. There is the occasional burst of histrionic acting that is followed by more staring into space. The pace of the movie is like that of molasses flowing uphill and really goes nowhere. This is a very amateurish production that clearly was a huge waste of money and time to produce!