Nello is a union organizer, but his union wants nothing to do with him. With ironic, cutting precision, they send him to run a cooperative of people with mental illness who have just left the asylum following the Basaglia law. The film begins here: Nello exiled from the union, the residents exiled from the asylum. General disappointment. It lasts a moment. What unfolds has been called by critics a "courteous fable of an assault on heaven"—a ragged group of people with mental illness transformed into a real team of professionals taking on paid work. Transformed into respected, content men and women. The beauty of this change is guided by their new director's practical sense. Facing people cast off and prejudged by society, he decides to treat them as true members of the cooperative. The young actors—Andrea Bosca and Andrea Gattinoni among them—play these residents with delicate realism, taking on each new responsibility with earnest gravity: the election of a president, membership meetings, the work itself. They draw the viewer into their project and their hopes with light smiles and little explanation. The cooperative's success does not spare it the hard blows life delivers. It zigzags between the skepticism and closed doors of other characters scattered through the story. Because in the early 1980s—we are in 1983, only five years after the law took effect—many doctors still insist that "mental illness cannot be repealed by a legal statute." So says Doctor Del Vecchio (Giorgio Colangeli), the embodiment of confidence in pharmaceutical intervention, which saves people from risks (yes, negative ones, but also positive ones). Then there are the families, long living with this reality. When their hopes for their children ignite, they also feel the shockwave of those hopes dashed. But Nello, played by a skilled Claudio Bisio, presses on. He sustains the character and potential of every cooperative member, respectfully educating these newly awakened men and women—who have known themselves only as patients—into dignity and freedom. Freedom even from the dependencies bred by years in the asylum. These were the hopes of psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, who died in 1980, and of the law bearing his name—celebrated but also much criticized and attacked. "Madness exists in us," the Venetian psychiatrist insisted, "present like reason itself. The problem is that society, to call itself civilized, should accept both reason and madness. Instead, it assigns to one science—psychiatry—the task of translating madness into disease, so that it can be eliminated." The film was released in 2008 on the thirtieth anniversary of the law. Between moments of joy and moments of depth, it urges us to continue reflecting on the law itself and on whether its original aims have been met. With gentle insistence, it invites us to pause and dwell for a time in the world of those who live daily with mental illness, and of those who choose to work there. So is it merely a feel-good fable? In truth, the film grows from a real experience: the Cooperativa Noncello, Italy's first Type B cooperative created for the employment of people with mental illness. It was founded by staff from the Community Mental Health Center in Pordenone. Before the film was made, the director spent long conversations with Rodolfo Giorgetti, a former UILM union organizer who served for some years as Noncello's director, and with Angelo Righetti, a "rebel" psychiatrist active at the Pordenone center. Not a fable, then, but a reality. And to satisfy some curiosity: today "Service Noncello" is a social enterprise with 580 employees and an annual turnover of more than eleven million euros. Enjoy.
M.C.V., 2008