‘Painless’ Venice Review: A Chance Encounter Spirals Into Crisis In Amelio’s Prickly Migration Drama

Over the course of a career now spanning 35 years, Italian director Gianni Amelio has made numerous films centered on immigration, such as Lamerica (1994), and has also taken on the difficulties faced by children in crisis, as in Il ladro di bambini (1992). Both of those thematic threads come together in Painless (Nessun Dolore), a film that takes a distinctly odd path toward its subject: African immigration to Europe, and to Italy in particular.

Davide (Alessandro Borghi) is a thirty-something who sells used books out of a small shop on a Roman piazza. He’s a calm, generous guy, relaxed on the surface. One afternoon he leaves Elsa (Valeria Golino), a regular customer, in charge of the shop while he goes out for lunch, and on his way he’s approached by an immigrant man who asks him to look after the child accompanying him. Davide keeps walking, but the boy trails behind him, following, refusing to let go. Davide offers him food, but the boy wants nothing — no food, nothing at all. Silent, not speaking the language, he simply follows him. At some point the man grows tired of the whole situation, shakes the boy off, and the child is struck by a motorbike in the street, left badly hurt.

Something in Davide breaks in that moment. Instead of going back to his shop, he heads to the hospital to find out what happened to the boy, then tries to track down some relative by wandering into neighborhoods where North African migrants live — but no one knows anything, and he quickly starts to feel out of place, even threatened. Back at the hospital, waiting for news, he runs into Aminah, a pregnant Algerian woman being thrown out of the emergency room for trying to sleep there. Out in the street, in the rain, Davide takes pity on her and brings her home. From there the film turns into a kind of strange odyssey: while Davide keeps trying to figure out what can be done for the boy, his apartment gradually fills up with immigrants who settle in, and he simply lets them stay.

In a film about guilt, responsibility, and a slow drift away from the world, Davide withdraws further and further into himself, abandoning his own life and handing his home over to its new occupants. Equal parts crisis and liberation, that choice brings him trouble —with neighbors, with the authorities— and seems to push him toward a state that could be read as grace, but could just as easily be surrender, or something close to madness. Amelio doesn’t underline the point or assign it a clear meaning, but the trajectory nonetheless reads as an uncertain search in which the protagonist starts to lose himself. From here on, his only remaining connections are Elsa and a man who works at a morgue (Valerio Mastandrea), who gradually becomes another emotional anchor for him.

The film makes some curious choices in how it positions and portrays the immigrants themselves. They remain, throughout, an alien presence, voiceless —none of them speak Italian, and communication is minimal— and aside from a few exceptions like Aminah, Amelio mostly presents them as selfish, opportunistic, cruel, and aggressive. It’s hard to tell exactly where the director is going with this portrait of migrants. There’s something valid, even interesting, in approaching the migration phenomenon without excessive condescension or feel-good sentiment, but at times Painless feels overly harsh, even cruel — as though Davide can’t see that these people simply want to take advantage of his confusion, mistaken for solidarity.

According to Amelio’s own statements, Painless is a film about «the opportunity to recognize one another as human beings.» Watching it, though, one sometimes gets the sense it’s proposing quite the opposite — that it’s the guilt Davide feels over a violent act he didn’t actually commit that sends him spiraling into a kind of unconsciousness, and that this spiral is what leads him to let the immigrants use him until he’s lost everything. Then again: in Davide’s case, perhaps losing everything is the best thing that could have happened to him.