The Best of Youth: Living History Firsthand, Without Exclamation Points

There are films that entertain, and then there are works that, almost without asking permission, install themselves in our consciousness, becoming part of our emotional landscape. These are films that do not merely tell a story, but aspire to define the spirit of an entire generation, to mirror a nation, to weave a tapestry so vast and detailed that it seems more real than reality itself. La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth) by Marco Tullio Giordana, written with the almost surgical sensitivity of Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, belongs to this rare category. It is a cinematic experience that feels more like a lifetime than a simple screening; a forty-year journey through Italian history that the viewer does not observe from a safe distance, but lives firsthand, through the joys, sorrows, dreams, and failures of the Carati family.

Many, seeking a comparison to describe its scope, have evoked another narrative colossus, Forrest Gump. The intuition is formally correct: both films use the “logic” of a personal biography as a common thread to traverse decades of national history. But this parallel, while useful, primarily serves to illuminate the immense differences that make Giordana’s work a uniquely Italian and profoundly European experience. If Zemeckis’s film is a bittersweet, almost surreal fable about American innocence traversing history without ever being truly scathed by it, La meglio gioventù is its exact opposite. It is an epic of dramatic realism, a lucid and at times ruthless analysis of how History, with a capital H, is not a backdrop but an active force that enters homes, shatters loves, diverts destinies, and leaves indelible scars on the souls of people.

It is a work that tells true stories, not because they happened exactly this way, but because they are plausible, because they resonate with the tales we have heard from our parents and grandparents. It tells of an Italy full of idealistic impulses and wounds that have never fully healed, a country that struggles, dreams, falls, and desperately tries to rise again. Through the divergent paths of the two protagonist brothers, Nicola and Matteo Carati, the film forces us to reckon with a universal and often painful truth: life almost never turns out the way we expect it to when we are young.

Nicola and Matteo: Two Opposite Ways of Being in the World

The beating heart of the film, its emotional and philosophical backbone, is the constant and never-resolved confrontation between the two brothers. Nicola and Matteo are not just characters; they are two archetypes, two antithetical responses to the same question: how does one exist in the world? How does one survive its beauty and its brutality?

Nicola: The Perfection of Respect and Its Painful Crisis

Nicola, portrayed by a Luigi Lo Cascio in a state of grace, embodies an almost unattainable ideal of a man for nearly the entire film. He is the good brother, the patient doctor, the empathetic intellectual, the psychiatrist who embraces the humanist revolution of Basaglia. His philosophy of life is based on an ethical principle he elevates to a dogma: absolute and unconditional respect for the freedom of others. Nicola never forces anyone’s hand. He does not judge, does not impose his vision, and never “invades” the space of others, even when that space is an abyss of pain.

We see him apply this principle with almost superhuman consistency. With Giorgia, the fragile girl saved from a future of electroshock therapy, his presence is constant but discreet, a support that never becomes possession. With his wife Giulia, lost in the paranoid and violent spiral of terrorism, he waits for years, hoping that her freedom of choice will bring her home, even when that freedom turns her into a threat. And above all, with Matteo, his tormented brother, his approach is made of attempts at understanding, of helpless glances, of a closeness that never manages to pierce the other’s armor of solitude. Nicola always chooses to “take a step back,” to be a safe harbor that waits, a light that illuminates from a distance without ever becoming an inquisitorial beacon.

This approach makes him appear “perfect,” but perfection is inhuman and, as the film suggests, perhaps also ineffective. Matteo’s death, his cold and deliberate suicide, is the cataclysm that shatters this certainty. It is Nicola’s existential failure. Standing before his brother’s body, all his convictions waver. He is forced to ask himself the most terrible question: what if my respect was just a more elegant form of cowardice? By not imposing myself, had I simply given up on saving him, masking my abandonment behind a noble philosophy?

Nicola’s arc of transformation culminates in one of the most intense and significant scenes in the film: an intimate and heartbreaking confession made not to a budding love, but to his sister Giovanna, the judge. The choice of interlocutor is brilliant. The dialogue becomes a confrontation between two worldviews: the empathetic and non-judgmental one of psychiatry and the normative and prescriptive one of the law. Nicola, the man who spent his life “understanding,” admits his failure to Giovanna, the woman whose profession is to “judge” and “impose” rules. In that moment, he understands that sometimes love is not just respect, but also responsibility. That sometimes, to love means to intervene, to shake, even to violate the other’s freedom when that freedom is merely a synonym for self-destruction. Nicola does not cease to be a good man, but he is reborn as a complete man, one who has learned firsthand that love, at times, must be stronger than respect.

Matteo: The Tragic Prison of Absolute Purity

If Nicola is the character of complexity and evolution, Matteo (an Alessio Boni of magnetic intensity) is one of Greek tragedy, a soul destined to burn out because of his own incandescent nature. He is a character of such rigid purity, of a sense of justice so absolute, that it becomes a deadly cage. His tragedy is that he is the cause of his own suffering.

His inability to fit in is not just social, but profoundly existential. Matteo cannot come to terms with compromise, with the shades of gray that constitute reality. He sees the world in black and white, right and wrong, pure and corrupt. This makes him a poor soldier, a tormented policeman, and ultimately, a man incapable of living.

His pathology of isolation manifests in emblematic gestures. The New Year’s Eve scene with his family is perhaps the perfect metaphor for him. Surrounded by the warmth, by the vital and imperfect “mess” of his family—everything he desires on a deep level—Matteo cannot be a part of it. He takes refuge in another room, picking up the receiver of a dead telephone, faking a call. This is not a simple passive escape, but an active and deliberate act of self-exclusion. He constructs a lie, a fake connection to a non-existent outside world, to avoid the real and overwhelming connection with his loved ones.

This is his modus operandi, the same he uses with Mirella, the luminous librarian who represents his greatest and only chance at salvation. She sees him, understands him, loves him unconditionally, offering him a future, a family, a son. But Matteo, faced with this gift, flees. He rejects her not out of malice, but because he feels so irredeemably “wrong” and contaminated by his own pain that he fears he might destroy her. Rejecting her is an act of self-sabotage disguised as an impossible and distorted form of protection. He loves her so much that he denies himself the right to be near her. His tragedy is that of a man who seeks an order and a perfection that do not exist, ultimately finding no place in the world, in the hearts of those who love him, or, finally, in his own life.

A Courageous Ending: To Heal, to Continue, to Begin Anew

After nearly six hours of drama, history, and introspection, the finale of La meglio gioventù manages to avoid any easy sentimentality, offering us a mature, courageous, and profoundly human conclusion. It is an ending that does not deny pain but affirms the tenacious persistence of life.

The relationship that blossoms between Nicola and Mirella is, by the standards of a traditional mindset, almost a taboo. Getting together with your deceased brother’s girlfriend, the mother of your nephew, is a “strong” choice, one that could be read as a lack of respect. But the film presents it as the exact opposite: it is an act of healing and continuity. It is not a betrayal of Matteo’s memory, but its highest fulfillment. Nicola, who could not save his brother from death, can honor him by saving a piece of his legacy, offering a father figure to his son Andrea and building a new family on the ashes of the one that was destroyed. It is the triumph of life over grief, of responsibility over regret.

The issue is resolved with sublime grace by the voice of the new generation itself. Andrea’s question in his letter, “So, what should I call you? Dad or Uncle?”, is a stroke of narrative genius. With the sharp wit of a boy who has already understood a great deal, he sweeps away all embarrassment and gives his blessing to this new, imperfect but loving family. It is not the question of a confused child, but the intelligent observation of a young man who accepts life’s complexity and approves of it with irony and affection.

The circle closes definitively with Andrea’s journey. The film had begun with Nicola and Matteo’s dream of reaching the North Cape, a journey interrupted almost immediately that set their divergent destinies in motion. Now it is Andrea, Matteo’s son, who undertakes that journey with his girlfriend. He is, symbolically, completing the path that his father and uncle could never finish. He is “moving on,” free from the ideological weight, the wounds of history, and the existential torments that weighed down the previous generation. His “doubt about what women are like” is a clean, universal doubt, that of every young person on the brink of life, not the paralyzing anguish that gripped his father.

The Beauty of the World, With and Without Exclamation Points

And so we arrive at the final message, the philosophical summation of an entire existence, encapsulated in a single, powerful phrase. When asked if he is still convinced that the world is beautiful, Nicola, now a mature man, replies yes, but that he would say it “without the exclamation points.”

This clarification is everything. It is the emotional keystone of the entire work. The exclamation points represent the naive and unconditional enthusiasm of youth. They are the conviction that life is a promise of happiness, an affirmation shouted with all the fervor of someone who has not yet known true pain. Their absence, however, represents wisdom. Nicola’s is no longer a hope, but a conscious realization, made after having lived through the flood, terrorism, the mafia, the crisis, the failure of his own marriage, and the suicide of his brother. It is an affirmation that does not ignore evil, but includes it and, despite everything, transcends it. It is beauty that survives, a beauty whispered, no longer shouted, earned at a great price.

But the film, with one last, brilliant stroke, shows us that history is cyclical. Andrea, on his journey north, echoes the same phrase, but with entirely different eyes. For him, “the world is beautiful” is not a conclusion, but a starting point. It is the hope upon which his journey is founded, the yet-to-be-discovered hypothesis that propels him toward the future.

La meglio gioventù thus closes by holding these two gazes together, one retrospective and the other projected forward. It honors the scar of memory while, at the same time, celebrating the bright opening of the future. It teaches us that lives can be broken, dreams can be shattered, but life, stubbornly, continues. It heals its wounds in unexpected ways and passes the baton to a new generation, free to begin discovering the world again and, perhaps, to put the exclamation points back, at least for a while.