Valerio Mastandrea has spent three decades as one of Italy’s most beloved actors, a Roman everyman in the lineage of Alberto Sordi, the kind of face that can slide from comedy to melancholy in a single beat. Feeling Better, his second film as director, opened the Horizons competition at Venice, and it arrives carrying a piece of advice he’d give his younger self, the line that titles this episode.
The hardest way is the right way.
He means it as a career philosophy and as the secret subject of the film itself. Every “no” he turned down, he says, every refusal to take the easy or expected path, turned out to be a good no.
Comfort Is the Villain
The Italian title of Feeling Better is Nonostante, which means “despite,” and the premise is a quiet sleight of hand. In a hospital, comatose patients live a parallel existence, able to see and talk to one another but unable to touch the world of the awake. Mastandrea plays one of them, a man who has come to find this suspended state rather pleasant: no responsibilities, no risk, no loss, just breathing and being. The coma, he explains, isn’t really a coma. It’s a metaphor for the emotionally stalled life, the one where you’ve quietly decided that feeling nothing is safer than feeling everything.
Then a new patient arrives, a young woman in a coma after a car accident, played by the Argentine actress Dolores Fonzi, and she refuses the unwritten rules of the place. He had wanted to work with Fonzi since seeing her in Santiago Mitre’s Paulina back in 2015; he simply sent her the script, and on their first video call, he says, it felt as though they’d known each other since they were young. She wants out. She wants to wake. Falling in love with her forces Mastandrea’s character to do the terrifying thing the comfortable never have to: choose life, and fight for it.
Here is the stance the film earns. Its real antagonist is comfort. The hospital isn’t a place of illness so much as a place of permission to feel nothing, and Mastandrea frames that anesthetized peace as the trap most people actually live inside. Love is the disease that cures it. And once you see that, you realize the film and the filmmaker are making the exact same argument, because everything in Mastandrea’s process is a refusal of the comfortable coma. A frictionless life, the movie says, is a kind of death, and the obstacle, the thing that wakes you and makes you fight, is the only real proof that you’re alive. He dedicated the film to his late father, a man who, he says, fell in love with everything and everyone.
The Actor Who Sabotaged Himself
Mastandrea’s leap from acting to directing is the clearest version of his hard-road creed. After nearly thirty years on the other side, he wanted more responsibility for the whole story, and his first lesson as a director, on his 2018 debut Ride, was humbling: he tried to get the other actors to play things his way, and they told him, we are not you, respect our job. So he learned to respect actors and let them surprise him. He’s the first to admit he isn’t a conventional craftsman: he leaves the script at home, arrives each morning knowing only what the day requires, and treats every scene, and the edit after it, as an act of searching rather than execution. If acting, he says, is being an arm, directing is being mind, heart, belly, everything.
On Feeling Better he did both at once, half a day as director, half a day as actor, which he compares to an Italian therapeutic exercise, the psychodrama, putting yourself in front of yourself. The hardest part wasn’t the physical stuff, though he did his own practical effects, hanging six or seven meters off the ground with no stunt double. The hardest part was editing his own performance. With his editor, Chiara Vullo, acting as a kind of therapist while he referred to his on-screen self in the third person, he kept hunting for the takes where he looked worse, where he was in trouble, because the polished ones were too easy and the movie needed the surprise.
Choose, sacrifice, and forget your ego.
That, he says, is the entire job. If he’s good in three scenes but those three scenes aren’t good for the movie, the movie wins. It’s a lesson he frames through basketball, which he played from age six to eighteen: you never play for yourself, never against your own team, and when trouble comes there’s no chief and no assistant, everyone owns the problem together.
The Feelings of Lost in Translation
Asked for the film behind Feeling Better, Mastandrea doesn’t reach for technique. He reaches for a feeling, the one Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation gave him.
He thinks about Coppola’s 2003 film, he says, as a person rather than as a filmmaker: a great love story of meeting and loss, two strangers forming an intense, transient bond in a liminal place neither belongs to, knowing it can’t last. That’s the emotional engine of Feeling Better, a romance lived fully despite, the word in its title, the certainty of separation. It puts the film in conversation with the surreal, aching metaphor-romance of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and with Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, where an immortal chooses the pain and mortality of a human life because love makes the choice worth it. Mastandrea’s comatose man is making the same bargain.
Carrying the Film Door to Door
The hard road extends past the edit, into how a film actually reaches people, and this is where Mastandrea is most clear-eyed. Italy has around 1,600 screens and only about fifty truly independent ones, and the danger to Italian cinema, he insists, is practical, not spiritual: there’s no shortage of gifted young directors with good stories, but a handful of gatekeepers control distribution, so getting seen is a matter of luck and bravery. His proof that the audience is there is There’s Still Tomorrow, Paola Cortellesi’s runaway hit, in which he starred, a film bigger at the Italian box office than even Life Is Beautiful. The audience exists; producers and distributors just have to be brave enough to risk something.
So he does the unglamorous thing. For Ride he spent a month going town by town through Italy’s independent cinemas, two screenings, two Q&As, then on to the next town, and he plans to do it again for Feeling Better, which is handled internationally by Fandango Sales. In an age drowning in social media, he argues, people are starving to meet people; the communal experience of a room watching a film together, with the filmmaker present to talk about it afterward, is something no big TV at home can replicate. He treats every one of those conversations as research, a chance to understand what he actually made. The audience, he says, is life, and a movie is a child you finally hand over to it. For Mastandrea, that long, exhausting, door-to-door road isn’t the cost of the work. It’s the proof that he refused the shortcut, and the shortcut, he’s certain, always makes you pay.
