"The Last One for the Road" — A Tragicomic Odyssey of Old Drunks on the Road to Venice

Francesco Sossai's new film doesn't give much credence to suspicious clinical terms like "alcoholism." Instead, it looks at drunkenness, blurriness, sorrow, and the occasional bout of nausea with wry indulgence; it winks at the tragicomic optimism of middle-aged drunks with the superpower to keep drinking at any hour of the day, always asking for "just one more." The same deadpan joke that repeats at the film's beginning and end sums it all up: someone on the brink of a permanent goodbye shouts a vital piece of advice, but it comes out too slurred to understand.

This is a road movie, a buddy film, a bit of a rambling shaggy-dog tale; a coming-of-age story that refuses to come of age; a bittersweet comedy with the sweetness rubbed away. Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) and Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) are two perpetually well-meaning drunk, hand-to-mouth middle-aged vagrants skirting the edge of petty scams. They live in a luxury car left over from selling designer glasses their partner Genio (Andrea Pennacchi) stole from a factory for next to nothing.

When Genio announces after years away that he's returning to Venice, the pair set off — but a ridiculous mistake causes them to miss him. Along the way they meet a young architecture student, Giulio (Filippo Scotti), who's pining, unrequited, for another student. Doriano and Carlobianchi sense this and Giulio, mildly annoyed, agrees to tag along with the two men. They take him to Carlo Scarpa's postmodernist Brion tomb; standing amid its concrete forms, a meditation on death, the film implies the characters are also quietly having their own reckoning.

Sossai shows Venice without a hint of sentimentality: a brief glimpse of Santa Croce, and Treviso, Italy's "Luton airport." The film's main thread is whether Doriano and Carlobianchi manage to heal Giulio's romantic wound; perhaps what they actually heal turns out to be their own longing for Genio. Giulio becomes the real third musketeer that Genio never could be. It's a lovable film that follows its nose wherever it leads, like a drunk stumbling through the afternoon.