Enea (Damiano Gavino) is a film student who often skips class to work crew on whatever project is filming in town or see what is playing that afternoon at the Nuovo Olimpo Cinema, a repertoire house that is also used by gay men for cruising.  The young man’s predictable agenda works to Pietro’s (Andrea Di Luigi) benefit, a med student, who catches the attention of Enea as he closes off a road for a shot.  Sure enough, they bump into each other at the cinema one afternoon and begin a passionate affair together.  They are separated, though, during the chaos of a political protest and never make it to the restaurant for their dinner reservations later that evening.  Ten years pass and Enea debuts his first film, a representation of the brief time he spent with Pietro, and Pietro, now a married doctor, sees the film and the memories of this tryst flood his mind while doubt about their relationship begin to plague his wife, Giulia (Greta Scarano). 

Ferzan Özpetek directs Nuovo Olimpo, an Italian-language queer romance for Netflix from a script he co-wrote with Gianni Romoli.  The decades-spanning narrative runs 113 minutes and is beautifully shot by Gian Filippo Corticelli and carefully edited by Pietro Morana.  While the film invokes the name of Italian maestro Federico Fellini, it is far more akin to the work of Wong Kar Wai in how it muses about the tragedy of a missed connection and the wondering about what could have been. 

The film is led by Gavino and Di Luigi and, for it being a first feature role for both actors, the two men foster an incredible chemistry in the opening act during 1978 when they meet by chance and fall apart just as suddenly.  Though Enea seems to be the main force behind the narrative, it notably never tilts into a work of complete self-adoration from the filmmaker as many films about filmmakers tend to do, and that is mostly due to the script not really treating Enea with much nuance.  Gavino is really held back by a blunt story that does not allow his character much room for growth in the back half of the narrative as he remains a bullheaded and self-centered boy throughout.  Further, there are no lessons learned, cliché as it may have been to have a film director realize that he cannot control his life as he can control the frame, it would have given Gavino something more to work with which the young actor seems totally capable of handling. His character is certainly humbled, but it is too little too late for us to be invested in his crucible as the film requires. 

Opposite him is the much more interesting Pietro.  Separated from Enea on his way to see his mother in the hospital when a protest march turns violent, he eventually goes on to meet and marry Giulia.  Jumping ahead ten years to 1988, Pietro and Giulia attend a film together; Enea’s first film that charts a passionate romance between two young men in Rome.  It touches a little close to home for Pietro because it is the story of him and Enea.  Audiences will watch this imitation play out along with Pietro and be reminded of the pure eros shared between the two men years earlier including a questionable use of marmalade.  Brief as the relationship may have been, it was electric, and when the camera returns to the married Pietro, Di Luigi affirms for us the tragedy of this missed connection with a pain behind his eyes that he struggles to hide from the intuitive Guilia. She will do her best to be strong, to excuse actions – or, more in this case, inactions – but Pietro’s reactions to the film all but confirms a suspicion we can tell has long been on her mind. 

Di Luigi thankfully gets much more to do in the second half of the film, and even though the camera finds itself more captivated by Gavino, Pietro is able to grow in warmth from his more hesitant to standoffish bravado nature from the first half.  Pietro is navigating his married life with a twinge of guilt, not specifically because he is gay, but because seeing Enea’s film made him realize more fully that the same spark he shared with Enea is missing from his marriage.  This dynamic has been on the rise as of late in queer narratives, but seldom is it handled as delicately as it is here.  While Pietro feels guilt for having those memories reawaken something inside him, it does not frame his admittedly fruitless marriage into something necessarily loveless as well.  It treats both him and Guilia as real, flawed people, but notably, it does not demonize him as is done in My Policeman (2022) among other films that seek to trivialize identity for the sake of drama.   

In the final twist of fate, Pietro, now a doctor, receives Enea as a patient after the director suffers an eye injury on set and is bandaged while he heals.  The film could have ended after Pietro walks away from the surgery, a cruel enough turn, but Romoli and Özpetek want to turn the knife just a little more.  Guilia, almost for sure knowingly, prompts Pietro to invite Enea over to dinner and at the conclusion, stating that her husband has never looked at her the way he looked at the director, tells him to go after Enea.  The camera lingers a moment on Guilia giving Scarano a brief yet searing moment before catching up with Pietro and Enea on the sidewalk where they say their final goodbye.  Rejecting the fairytale ending for something all-too-real, we know, along with the two men, that their story has ended.  Özpetek still ends his film with a bit of a dream, though, as Andrea Guerra’s score swells in the empty streets and gives way to chatter, Corticelli’s camera pans down the alley until settling on the widow of a restaurant and framed by the sill, as if framed by the proscenium of a cinema screen, we see a young Enea and Pietro laughing, dining; the start of a life that will never be. 

Nuovo Olimpo is a handsomely crafted film with strong emotional weight and exceptional performances.  Despite its craft, it does struggle a little to break apart and find what makes it unique, but Özpetek proves to be an expert navigator even across this well-trodden narrative ground.  The whole conceit is that the romance formed in the opening is fleeting, but when that chemistry is removed, the film deflates; a hurdle that many films in this subgenre of doomed lovers must overcome. With a more balanced script and some more nuanced writing, Nuovo Olimpo would been more equipped to face that challenge and break into the hallowed halls of shattering and pining romance that it is emulating, but for what it is, it is a strong effort that is easy enough to fall into.  It peddles in high emotions as the characters wrestle with their dreams and aspirations, but notably, it never falls into egregious cliché melodrama so while the catharsis may not be as seismic as one would want, the film can still be mined for feelings upon revisiting these fated pairs as they collide and fall apart, time and time again.