The beauty of a story doesn’t always consist in its apparent originality, but in its emotional consistency that pushes the narrative towards the intimate or the neuralgic areas of the human soul. The short film ‘The Same Story‘, as the title suggests, doesn’t aim to reveal original narrative nuances, but the glow of its characters makes it emanate a special energy, while exposing the evolution of a trio of friends facing their personal and social aspirations. Combining in an elegant way the past with the present, friendship and duty, idealism and pragmatism, Alice Airoldi sketches within the conventions of a nostalgic realism the apogee and the decline of a friendship compromised by the ideological disputes specific to America of the 60s. The characters chosen by the director, typical typologies for the times described in the project, are faced with the choice between a purely discursive attitude and a concrete action, despite any risks, when the social balance seems to be threatened.
But this short film doesn’t talk about heroes and losers in a classic way, while the social and the personal good are not always compatible. This is the great quality of the project which avoids adopting a rebellious-romantic formula, at the end of which we can find an irrefutable rightness. More precisely, keeping the parameters of an intense authenticity that the director maintains with a fine psychological dose, the film depicts the personal failure of those blinded by the premises of a “socialist” justice which, in fact, is nothing but a literary utopia. The typology of the revolutionary who misses their own existence thus becomes the nucleus of this emotional and bitter testimony of a camaraderie vitiated by the politics of the era.
Even if the narrative and psychological substance of this project could easily serve as the basis of a feature film, Alice Airoldi manages to extract a homogeneous story without destabilizing the coherence of the protagonists’ intentions. Thus, despite those inevitable ellipses that cover several years of the lives of the three friends, the short film evolves with almost impeccable precision towards the climax that each viewer is free to choose. The balance without exaggerated emphasis between past and present create a gap in time by synthesizing the recognizable and empathetic individualities who, even though belonging to a certain social and temporal context, are more “actual” than we might think. ‘The Same Story’ may be a story you’ve seen before, but its honesty and emotional vibration should definitely convince you to give it a try.
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