Massi and I always traveled by night, in a sleeper berth. But once there were no bunks available, so we took the day train to Trieste. Eight hours, barring delays. The moment we boarded, Massi started singing: Romagna mia, La mula di Parenzo, Ci son due coccodrilli, Farfallone amoroso, Volare, Marcia turca, Vola vola. The other passengers, even the conductor, knew most of them. By the end we had a traveling chorus, everyone grateful for the time that flew by, marveling at what a wonderful blond boy.
Massi is still very handsome, but he's twenty-eight now, and that kind of sweetness carries less weight these days. Once, in fact, we were barred from boarding—while the other passengers looked on with complete indifference—an Air France flight to Paris. The captain feared Massi's presence might disturb the other travelers. To be fair, the captain's thick-headedness has its own logic: autistic people exist only while they're in school. Once they turn eighteen, most are warehoused in centers, see the light of day less and less, become ghosts. And when they do appear, people are unsettled.
Gianluca Nicoletti starts from this awareness in his beautiful film Tommy and His Friends (2017), made with director Massimiliano Sbrolla. The protagonist is Tommaso, the filmmaker's autistic son, the guide who leads his father across the length of Italy. Along the way, roughly twenty stories emerge—families with children, adults, positioned at various points on the autism spectrum. Kids like Tommy, labeled low-functioning; kids with other challenges alongside autism; others brilliant and inventive. A hidden autistic everyday life, never presented as an unbearable weight, but touched with a lightness and irony that these remarkable young people seem to grant us.
There is Achille, who—in the name of justice, on the island of Maddalena, surrounded by gulls—redistributed eggs equally in the nests, much to the dismay of the gulls, who flew about shrieking in protest. There is Giacomo, tall and solid, with his father Walter, thin and wiry, retired and devoted entirely to him. There is Lorenzo's mother in Calabria, desperate about the endless turnover of substitute teachers, dreaming of moving to Trentino. One can hardly breathe listening to Paolo's story: he needed a cavity filled, and the dentist decided to extract all his teeth to "sanitize" his mouth. Then there is Gabriella, a former doctor, who every evening after putting her twenty-year-old daughter Benedetta to bed writes her a letter in English, pretending to be Harry Potter. In the morning, Benedetta writes back, also in English, confiding her thoughts to Harry Potter. And many other stories, listened to without judgment—tales of families pinning hopes on treatments that cost far more than they can afford.
Everyone asks the same question: what will happen to my child after I'm gone? The film shows, clearly and often, that no one wants to answer. We are on a path whose end we cannot see, and do not wish to see. Yet the film does not leave one feeling discouraged—at least it didn't leave me that way. Times have changed since even someone as politically correct as Arthur Miller kept his son hidden away. And slowly, they will keep changing.
But the evening after I saw Nicoletti's film, RAI broadcast Life Animated (2016). Directed by Roger Ross Williams, the documentary tells the story of Owen Suskind, a boy born "normal" who, at age three, suffered a regression that drew him deeper and deeper into himself, until he was diagnosed with a condition on the autism spectrum.
Owen has a special bond with Disney cartoons. His parents realize that these films might be the key to reaching him. So, step by step, using dialogue from movies Owen knows by heart, mother and father coax him back out into the world. Despite his differences, at twenty-three Owen graduates with honors, moves into his own apartment, and navigates even romantic disappointment with ease.
Given the genuine pain at the heart of his story, one might have expected something more complex from this film. Instead it is so perfectly rounded, so complete, it borders on the uncomfortable. Parents forever calm and in perfect harmony. A brother rising to every occasion. Therapists in perpetual team meetings, alert to every nuance for perfectly calibrated interventions. Owen progressing miraculously day by day. Immaculate houses. Never a shortage of time or money. Green lawns to play on.
It goes beyond the fairy tale Propp describes: Owen as protagonist, autism as antagonist, Disney films as magic charm, and all the helpers virtuous. The villains? The doubts? The setbacks? Gone. Here the American dream—anything is possible with frontier spirit—arrives in an autistic version, complete with its obligatory happy ending.
Politicians prefer bad press to silence; visibility beats oblivion. The same holds true for autism and those affected by it. A flawed film that keeps the problem visible is better than the silence of indifference. But families with young children must not believe the Disney miracle applies to them. That belief would only boost the box office.
Nicla Bettazzi, 2018
(from L'Osservatore Romano - November 8, 2017)