26/02/2025 - Italian director Maurizio Nichetti returns to directing a film for the big screen after 23 years of absence, and finds everything very changed

The dictature of drones, green screen and content creators, but also once frozen lakes that now aren’t anymore, a looming environmental threat and a film to direct, despite it all. Many things have changed since Maurizio Nichetti directed his latest feature film for the big screen (Honolulu Baby, in 2001), and it is precisely about the way of making films today that the Milan director-actor-writer jokes in Amiche Mai, his new unusual and provocative comedy (“a second debut film”, in his words), coming out in Italian cinemas on 27 February through Filmclub Distribuzione after premiering last November at the 42nd Torino Film Festival.

The premise is meta-cinematic: through the stories of two young and very excited tiktokers (Gelsomina Pascucci and Pia Paoletti), we find ourselves at the press conference announcing the new film by Maurizio Nichetti, and then directly on set, where the two girls will document the shoot step by step with their smartphones. The action then shifts to the film to be shot, a road movie starring Angela Finocchiaro (already directed by Nichetti in Ratataplan, Ho fatto splash and To Want to Fly) and Turkish actress (a favourite of Ferzan Ozpetek) Serra Yilmaz. The first (Anna) is a veterinarian and an affectionate housewife; the second (Aysè) is the clever caregiver for the sick father, Gino (Vittorio Grezzi). When the latter dies, the two women (together with Anna’s daughter, played by Astrid Casali) are summoned by the solicitor for the inheritance. Anna fears the worst, which is that Aysè may have forced Gino to change his will in her favour at the last moment, without anyone knowing. Instead, with great surprise, the faithful blue-haired caretaker only gets Gino’s bed. The problem now is how to transport the bed from Trieste to Turkey, where Aysè wants to go back. Anna therefore finds herself obligated to give the old caretaker a ride with her pick-up truck (what’s important is for the woman, for whom Anna never had much sympathy, to get out of her life), and so the two women set out on a long journey on the road through the Balkans, where there will be no shortage of strange encounters and plot twists.

The Finocchiaro-Yilmaz couple of sworn enemies works very well on screen and the screenplay (written by Nichetti from a subject also by Finocchiaro) puts the two actresses in very entertaining, even surreal, situations. Every once in a while, we exit the film being made and the two tiktokers reappear, as they update their followers on the progress of the shoot, in the midst of unforeseen events and impending catastrophes. In the long run, these meta-cinema inserts become longer and more didactic, and the environmental question forcefully enters into the evolution of the shoot, since the frozen lake where the main scene was to be shot simply no longer exists – it melted and will therefore be recreated digitally. Technical details and alarming news broadcasts follow, but the spectator, in reality, can’t wait to return to the two surly protagonists of the film and see what will become of them…

Perhaps easier to watch than to explain, Amiche Mai is a surprising, unconventional film that looks at the evils of the world (and of cinema) with a melancholy smile – a bizarre, messy comedy that bursts with vitality and which signs a worthy return on the scene for Nichetti, an auteur who still has things to say and who we hope will find (again) his audience.

Amiche Mai is an Italian-Slovenian co-production by Paco Cinematografica and Lokafilm.

(Translated from Italian)