VENICE 2026 Venice Open Out of Competition
Review: No Pain
- VENICE 2026: The screenplay behind Gianni Amelio’s muddled romantic fable lacks the rhetorical resources needed to make the plot plausible
Helping. It’s a pure and noble idea, unless it becomes the perfect smokescreen to massage the helper’s ego, hypocritically assuage lingering post-colonial guilt or perpetuate dynamics of subjugation and dependency. In No Pain, the fifteenth feature in the long career of Gianni Amelio which is screening out of competition in the Venice Film Festival, the protagonist, Davide, suddenly comes face to face with and deeply entangled in the reality of irregular immigration in Rome. More than thirty years after the chilling portrait of post-communist Europe that was Lamerica, the 80-year-old filmmaker is revisiting his vision of a globalised world barging into our homes and upsetting the balance.
Alessandro Borghi plays this awkward, wide-eyed lead who sells second-hand books in a square in the capital, but who admits to his most loyal customer, Elsa (Valeria Golino), that he doesn’t love reading, whereas she teaches literature at the university. One day, Davide is followed by a North African child (Gabriel Bovino) at the behest of the latter’s young father (Ramzi Lafrindi) who can no longer provide for him. When Davide realises the boy isn’t content with a single banknote, he forcefully pushes him away and the child is subsequently struck by a motorbike. After spending the night in hospital, Davide learns the boy didn’t pull through. The head of the morgue (Valerio Mastandrea) explains that only a relative can claim the body and that after a certain period it will be cremated.
Davide decides to look for the child’s relatives. Here, Amelio plunges his protagonist into the destitution and abandonment of the invisible world of undocumented migrants, who find refuge beneath the metropolis’s overpasses, and Luan Amelio Ujkaj’s cinematography captures those atmospheres admirably. In the meantime, Davide takes in a young pregnant Arab woman called Aminah (Beidja Yahiaoui), who’s been driven out of the hospital waiting room where she was seeking shelter for the night. Every time he returns home – a large apartment whose walls are lined with books, inherited from his father – Davide finds that a new group of (uninvited) guests has joined Aminah. Migrants from various countries cook, make music and camp out among the books as the host looks on indifferently: a paradoxical scene hinting at a misguided idea of “hospitality” (“And the other millions?”, Elsa needles him).
However, within the director’s avowed need to imagine a possible solution to the immigration dilemma lies the misunderstanding that’s at the heart of public debate in many countries of the so-called Global North, where, for years, the left has focused on human rights, adopting migration policies which have proved politically unsustainable. The film’s “Candide” suffers from a guilt that drives him to atone and is ultimately sent to prison (where he draws inspiration from reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, a gift from Elsa) for aiding and abetting illegal immigration. Once free, he pursues a single goal: to give a Muslim child a proper burial in his own (Christian) family chapel. The words uttered at the beginning of the film are significant in this sense: “The story we’re telling you hasn’t actually happened yet,” pointing to the possibility of a fairer world. Unfortunately, unlike the hundreds of other European films to have tackled this subject over the years, there’s no exploration of migrant characters, their feelings or their thoughts in this movie (although this could definitely have been done with young Aminah), while the screenplay behind this muddled romantic fable lacks the rhetorical resources needed to make the plot plausible or compelling.
No Pain was produced by Kavac Film, Our Films and Be Water Film together with Rai Cinema. 01 Distribution will release the film in Italian cinemas, while Rai Cinema International is handling international sales.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 03/09/2026: Venice 2026 - Nessun dolore
22 pictures available. Swipe left or right to see them all.
© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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