What I found most interesting about this section of the "Best of Youth" film was the relationship between the two brothers, and how it develops through the film. Early on in the section we watched, the brothers are both going to university, have relatively little to care about besides their grades and their upcoming trip, and are shown to be very good friends, trusting one another and spending a lot of time together. Their relationship begins to shift after their experiences with trying to care for the mentally ill Giorgia, where the once confident Matteo is shaken by his failed grades and his inability to protect Giorgia, while Nicola strikes out on his own to find peace after their rift in the train station. Matteo joins the army, while Nicola becomes a lumberjack in Norway. Nicola returns to Italy in November of 1966 after intense flooding in Florence, and meets Matteo again in person. When the two reunite, Nicola sees that the army has taken some of the personality from his brother, once an avid reader, who in a scene starts to read an old Latin manuscript, but when a call to get back to work is made, Matteo suggests to his brother that they should return to work, demonstrating to the audience that he no longer cares for something that was once precious to him. Nicola, on the other hand, has gained a new lease for life, maintaining the sympathy that he was known for before his trip. The rift between the brothers is widened further when Matteo announces to Nicola that he plans on signing on with the Army in order to become a police officer, a decision that Nicola scorns so heavily that Matteo plays the announcement off as a joke. This stands to demonstrate the changes between the two; while they previously scorned authority, Matteo sees it as a way to get ahead and decides to rush headlong into it. When the brothers are once again reunited, it is 1974, during the student protests in Torino, where Nicola has stepped away from the student protest world, finding the violence to be too much for him. Matteo, on the other hand, is a riot police officer, stepping headlong into the violence every day. The brothers reunite and discuss their lives, along with Nicola's girlfriend Giulia, who vehemently opposes Matteo's line of work, claiming he is on the wrong side of the conflict. Matteo reacts angrily, and claims she doesn't understand what it's like to be part of the conflict. The scene stands to show that Matteo has delved deeply into the negative aspects of his personality, the rage that peeked from beyond the curtain previously in certain situations on full display within his job, spiraling him further into depression and anger, juxtaposing Nicola, who has found peace with Giulia and seeks to live a quiet life.
Further on in the movie, I would like to focus on a specific scene in which Matteo interacts with Giorgia for the first time since they lost her originally. For context, Matteo has just been essentially fired from the police force, and has no other direction for his life. Given his newfound free time, he decides to go see Giorgia at Nicola's behest. When he is reintroduced to her again, he finds that she is unresponsive. She stares emptily at the wall, and try as he might he cannot get through to her. What particularly interested me about this interaction, however, was that for the majority of his dialogue, at least until he brings up their experiences together over the summer in the past, the scene feels as if he's describing himself rather than her. He says something along the lines of "Look at you, air, words, feelings, it all passes right through you". While he is saying this about her, his dialogue feels as if he's discussing himself, taking an introspective look at what his underlying emotional problem is, or lack of emotion altogether. When Giorgia finally recognizes him, she begins by mispronouncing his name "matto", meaning mad or crazy. In her case it may be a reference to her condition, and in his it's a reference to his anger issues. It strikes a chord with the audience because the multiple meanings to the word describe both of them simultaneously, and the audience recognizes this facet about both characters before they are reconnected to each other.
Much later on in the film, toward the end, is another scene that I felt was significant within the theme of forgiveness that permeates the twilight chapters of the movie. In this scene, Nicola and Giulia's daughter Sara is grown up and engaged to be married, and asks to speak to her father in private, confessing that her mother has sent her a letter and wishes to see her. Nicola asks "Are you happy?" to which Sara replies that she is. Nicola then suggests that she share the wealth, and Sara goes and visits her mother. I felt that watching the scene was essentially nearly 20 years of trauma beginning to be repaired, as the two haven't interacted since 1983 when Giulia was originally imprisoned. Sara is desperate for a motherly figure, and Giulia is desperate to have someone around her to love and be loved by; the two begin acting like mother and daughter again, with Sara even choosing to open up to Giulia about her secret pregnancy. Sara then leverages this secret into getting something personal out of her mother, asking her to play the organ in the church they visited. Giulia seems nervous, commenting that she doesn't think they are allowed to play it, but Sara brusquely reminds her that she was a former international terrorist with the Red Brigade and to ask permission from a priest is silly given her history. The trade off in this scene of well-guarded secrets allows the two to begin anew, and when Sara leaves Giulia indicates that she will come help with the baby when it is born.
Overall, I felt this movie was an amazing analysis of the family dynamic, and seeks to demonstrate that even on a small scale, history repeats itself, for better or for worse.
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