"For me, before being a science fiction film, Another End is a love story. About the love that lives in words, among thoughts, in memories, but above all that lives and grows in silence in bodies. Secretly. Like a
secret of the body".
This is how Piero Messina summarizes his Another End at the Berlinale, the first of the two Italian films in competition.
The fact that even in his first film, The Wait, there is the theme of detachment explains the director: "I am convinced that absence is truly fertile ground because it highlights love and experience even more".
This is the story.
Sal (Gael Garcia Bernal) is a man full of pain and without tears since he lost Zoe (Renate Reinsve), the love of his life who died in a car accident for which he feels responsible.
Thus begins in the spirit of the most classic of duos, love and death, Another End by Piero Messina, one of the two Italian films competing in this 74th edition of the Berlinale.
But we find ourselves in a dystopian time and his sister Ebe (Bérénice Bejo), worried about his mental health, suggests that he rely on Another End, a new technology that promises to alleviate the pain of separation by bringing back to life, for a short time, the consciousness of who is gone.
So Sal will be able to find his Zoe again, but in the body of another woman.
An unknown body in which he mysteriously recognizes his wife.
What was broken seems to be recomposed.
Another End gives Sal some time to share some more life with Zoe, to love her again, to be loved by her.
But his joy is ephemeral.
At the end of the program, will Sal really be able to say goodbye to his wife for the second time?
"The founding image of the film? - underlines Messina - The bodies of two strangers looking at each other motionless as soon as they wake up. However, I didn't want to make a science fiction film - he adds - I opposed this idea in every way".
Why not shoot Another End with an Italian cast?
"It came from the fact that I needed actors who brought something asymmetrical, unsettling, not immediately recognizable to the film."
Taking center stage at the meetings in Berlin, in addition to the director, was the Mexican Gael Garcia Bernal: "This film full of open questions was a fantastic journey. One above all, in Western countries we separate the body from people's lives and this does not I know how right it is."
And again the actor, who is also running at the Berlinale with La Cocina, when asked if he would ever use this technique: "At the beginning of the film I totally excluded it, but then at the end of filming I thought about it again, even if I am convinced that if I ever decided to I wouldn't tell anyone to use it."
Bejo is of the same opinion: "I was also initially against it, but if a person suddenly disappears, why not? It would give you the opportunity to say goodbye to them, to tell them those things that you couldn't say to them."
Bejo then joked about her role as Hebe: "A complex, complicated person who above all you can't talk about without giving spoilers. A character who hides a lot of things. Another End - she concludes - is a melancholy and romantic film and which between among the many questions it poses is this: is the body really the memory of a person or is it not?"
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