Watched Italy's 2023 Nuovo Olimpo (1:52:14). Enea Monte, a Cinema major, and Pietro Gherardi, a medical student visiting Rome, see each other for the first time during a location shoot of a movie in which Enea is assisting as a student volunteer. They meet again inside Nuovo Olimpo, a movie house frequented by gay cruisers. They have a relationship and fall deeply in love with each other--until they are separated by a violent protest during which Pietro is hit by a vehicle and breaks his arm.
Flashforward to many years later. Enea is now a well-acclaimed movie director, Pietro a surgeon, and Nuovo Olimpo has deteriorated into a porn movie house. While shooting his 14th movie, a special-effects explosion blows glass fragments into Enea's eyes. Serendipitously, he is brought to a hospital where Pietro is assigned to perform surgery on him.
While this is a bromance--as China's Word of Honour and The Untamed are bromances--this film is primarily about synchronicity and fate and only secondarily about gay relationships. In addition, it is about the women in the protagonists' lives--Titti, Alice, Pietro's mother, the unseen Grandma, Enea's movie actresses, Giulia, Giulia's female friends, even (the suspiciously Filipino maid) Nora--more than it is about Enea, Pietro, and their gay acquaintances.
The love scenes are tender and lyrical. The movie house's name--Nuovo Olimpo--seems to allude to the relationship between Zeus and Ganymede on Mount Olympus. The scenes operate on parallels and tangents, most of them having to do with movies and moviemaking. Kudos to the make-up department for the subtle but effective aging of the performers. And that bittersweet ending shot was perfect--there could have been no other way to conclude the story.
This is one of the few movies that creatively make use of cinematic time and space. Ironically, for Enea and Pietro, time and space "get in the way."
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