In recent years, we've become familiar with Alzheimer's disease—a degenerative dementia that progressively destroys brain cells and reduces its victims, step by step, to incapacity. The damage is relentless.
Once, this harsh and pitiless disease inspired only dread. We didn't speak of it. The prognosis was grim, treatment nonexistent, and the emotional and logistical toll on families was staggering. But something has shifted. We've begun to talk about it openly—even more than that, we've started trying to understand it. We want to find a way to connect with those who suffer from it. Two recent works—a novel and a film—signal this change. Each in its own way, both the book and the movie attempt to enter the disease itself, to learn how to live alongside it, to speak with it as gently as we can.
We've already discussed the novel "Perdersi" here. But Pupi Avati's latest film, "Boundless Youth," does something equally important. It helps us understand what an Alzheimer's patient experiences. It shows us, tangibly, how much we've failed—and continue to fail—in our attempts to relate to this disease. It suggests a direction, even if there is no single formula that always works.
Fabrizio Bentivoglio (as Lino) gives a masterful performance as a sports journalist slowly claimed by the disease, while Francesca Neri plays Chicca, his wife—stubborn, determined to maintain connection with the man she has loved for years. Nothing about it is easy. From her perspective, we witness the sorrow of watching him lose pieces of himself: sometimes with awareness, sometimes with violence, often becoming unintelligible to those around him. But one scene stands out—when Lino and Chicca play together on a racetrack drawn on the floor of their spacious home. It's unforgettable: full of poetry and quiet force. He is absorbed, narrating a stage of the Giro d'Italia. She laughs and plays along—lucid, aware, but having found a passage into his mind.
Because even as memory dissolves, even as he slips further from himself and those he loves, even as his past fragments into an inexplicable and selective temporality, the Alzheimer's patient remains a person. Remains that person.
Giulia Galeotti, 2011