La Gioia
Drama • 2025 • 1h 48m
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
Gioia, a fifty-year-old high school teacher, lives with her elderly parents and has never known love, except for the suffocating kind offered by her family. Alessio, a student, is a young man who uses his body to earn a few hundred euros to help his mother, a supermarket cashier. A forbidden bond arises between them, fragile yet inexplicably necessary for both. The film is loosely inspired by the real case of Gloria Rosboch, murdered in January 2016 by her 22-year-old former pupil, Gabriele Defilippi.
In the innermost heart, in the most secret place of happiness, dwells anguish, which is despair: this is despair’s dearest dwelling place, the one it prefers above all others: deeply within happiness.
— Søren Kierkegaard
— Søren Kierkegaard
With La Gioia, Gelormini once again grapples with the unstable threshold between factual news and metaphor, between reality and its allegorical transfiguration. The title, ironically paradoxical, does not summon any sense of fullness but rather signals a condition of radical lack, a suspension that corrodes from within and knows no remedy. The echo of the true story underpinning the narrative acts as an inescapable weight: the attempt to introduce fragments of sarcasm, instead of lightening, only deepens the tonal register of the film, as though irony itself, rather than liberating, became an additional layer of darkness.
The film opens in a Sorrentino-esque style, evoking from the outset the tension between irony and tragedy. Gioia appears as a suspended figure: a Juventus fan — a victorious team in a losing life — she embodies the logic of ends justifying the means, of pleasure prevailing over conquest. She who, as Freud would say, traded freedom for safety as a self-protected category, now exposes herself, reckless, audacious, fragile. Her trajectory is that of one who both flees and captures joy, always at the risk of dissolving it.
Alessio, a distracted pupil, during a lesson on Kierkegaard, responds to a question about anguish with the unthinking remark: “What anguish? I feel fine.” In this seemingly light reply, the abyss of his being is revealed. No faith in paradox, no awareness of existential scandal: for him there is only possession and money, pleasure as the only law. Whereas Kierkegaard inscribes anguish in the realm of possibility, Alessio reduces it to insignificance: a symptom of an age that rejects limits and surrenders to the bulimic consumption of the instant.
Emblematic in this perspective is Gioia’s question to Alessio: “What do you put inside nothing to make it become something?” It is not merely an existential query, but also an implicit confession. Gioia, though a woman of letters, remains inexperienced, unable to embody in life what she handles in words; Alessio, child of an era governed solely by immediate gratification, devoid of desire and law, incarnates an empty narcissism, without empathy, incapable of love. Both are figures of “nothing” attempting in vain to generate a “something,” mirroring one another in a play of mutual annihilation.
The film grants both moments of tenderness and extreme vulnerability, revealing a “too human” humanity that emerges as a forsaken site, abandoned to itself. Yet it is always an egoistic fragility, marked by a headless pleasure, without the balancing force of desire, unable to restrain itself, destined to overflow into the most terrifying forms of human horror. In this dynamic, the song Dreams Are My Reality emerges as a metaphor: not escape, but the retention of the unbearable, the loss of contact with reality when the drive detaches from desire and becomes a blind, autonomous, toxic discharge.
Gioia, a neutral figure never truly seen by anyone, is perhaps seen for the first time, and Alessio, perhaps welcomed for the first time, cannot bear the gaze and flees. For the gaze is the only possibility of existence, yet no one can endure being truly seen without first having learned to see themselves. Hence the flight: Gioia from prudence and the principle of reality, Alessio from the very possibility of being recognized as lacking, unloved, used, lifeless. The film depicts twisted, broken, unrestrained bodies immersed in an ontological void that becomes the realm of egoism and lawless enjoyment.
Both are marked by the absence of the father. For Gioia, the father is devoured by Alzheimer’s, a presence erased by illness; for Alessio, childhood is marked by an originary absence. Both, however, are burdened with mothers who are, in their own way, excessively invasive, to a pathological degree.
With his now unmistakable style, Gelormini once again leaves prudery offscreen, directing flawless performances and supporting them with a finely tuned screenplay, impeccable set design, a nihilist architecture, and an overwhelming soundtrack. Yet these elements do not serve as mere narrative support: they unfold as autonomous forces shaping the spectator’s very experience. Music does not decorate but invades, imposing itself as an alien body that bursts in and overpowers; architecture, stripped of function, becomes the tangible image of the nihilism that consumes the characters; the writing, precise and implacable, orchestrates the downfall without concessions, without consoling openings.
The mid-film and final setting in Turin’s Lingotto — the former FIAT factory, a deconsecrated temple of industrialization — is not merely scenographic. It is a key. That monumental architecture, emptied of its original function, becomes a mirror of the protagonists’ interiority: a titanic, silent body that preserves only its own absence. Gelormini thus places the individual drama within a universal frame, where the void is not an exception but the ontological condition of the present.
The film, with striking lucidity, portrays without judgment this unconscious void that pervades all the characters: a void incapable of understanding or willing, a condition that renders them victims of egoism and compulsive enjoyment, unable to construct an identity, alien to the very process of subjectivation.
A film Jacques Lacan would have appreciated: the representation of a micro/macrocosm of jouissance, where the pursuit of immediate satisfaction and the drive’s discharge stand opposed to the logic of desire and language, signaling the contemporary excess that disregards law and limit. All the protagonists are afflicted by this impossible possibility, which makes the construction of identity and the initiation of subjectivation irreconcilable. Dreams Are My Reality thus becomes the very metaphor of the loss of contact with reality, when the drive autonomizes itself, overrides desire as encounter with the other, and turns every relationship into a means, an instrument, an end justified a priori. Here, encounter never truly occurs: the other is always an object of use, a vehicle for the discharge of the drive.
It is within this combination of irony that deepens, of spaces that resonate as tombs of desire, and of bodies that no longer know how to inhabit themselves, that Gelormini’s authorial signature resides: a cinema that refuses catharsis, leaving the spectator immersed in the same existential void that condemns the protagonists, transforming the darkness of the theater into an extension of their very absence.
As is customary in the concrete evolution of things, he who has triumphed and attained enjoyment becomes completely idiotic, capable of nothing but enjoyment, while he who has been deprived of it retains his humanity… The satisfaction of need appears as the illusion against which the demand for love shatters.
— Jacques Lacan
