Nodon’t hate is a first work by Mauro Mancini with Alessandro Gassman (aired tonight on Rai 3 tonight at 21.50). Presented at Venice Film Festival 2020 (Critics Week), the film had achieved excellent critical acclaim, thrilling the festival audience. Now it’s the TV show’s turn.
Gassman interprets the surgeon of Jewish origin Simone Segre who, on a night like many others, finds himself helping a man involved in a car accident. The driver is seriously injured, but Simone decides not to help him when he sees a swastika tattooed on his chest. From the next day he is wracked with guilt.
Do not hate: the plot
The film, set in a city in the north-east where different ethnicities, impulses and deep Jewish roots intertwine, tells of Simone Segre (Gassman), a surgeon of Jewish origin who one day finds himself rescuing a man involved in a car accident. When she finds it on her chest he has a swastika tattoo his saving impulses leave room for other feelings. Simone had a deported father during the Second World War and shaken by the Nazi symbol he decides to let the man die. No one witnesses the dramatic moment.
However, that image does not leave Simone who is overwhelmed by guilt. Thus she begins to inquire about the man she held in her hands and about his family. She discovers that she has three children: Marica (Sara Serraiocco), the eldest of 27 years; Marcellus (Luke Zunic), a teenager who is stirred up by the seed of racial hatred like the father, and the third, Paolo (Lorenzo Buonora). The surgeon hires Marica as a domestic assistantHowever, Marcello cannot bear that his sister is employed by a Jew.
The existential drama of a man played by a perfect Gassmann
The film raises important questions and it does so without rhetoric or stereotyped use of the word. Mauro Mancini goes straight to the point, use a soft tone: it is more the silences that tell the existential drama of a man that the words. At the same time that drama seems to want to share it with the observer. As if to ask: And how would you have behaved in my place? Is it possible to forgive someone blinded by an ideology? The spectator almost becomes an active part of the story.
Alessandro Gassman is perfect in the part of Simone, is one of his best and most rigorous interpretations. This man carries visceral pain, a burden heavy as a boulder, difficult to sustain. And the viewer would almost like to help him. Simone is looking for a way out, for a glimmer of forgiveness that can calm her disturbance. It’s impossible to forget, but life can open up new paths, even unthinkable ones.
A film against hate
In a society increasingly entangled in hatredthis film is there to row against resentment and blind hatredrow in the opposite direction, towards the forgiveness and tolerance, towards a future that could improve. It’s just up to us to make the effort. Basically the protagonists of Do not hate they are normal beings who are faced with extraordinary situations.
The story is inspired by a true story. «We were inspired by a news story that took place in Germany – said the director. A Jewish doctor refused to operate on a patient because of the conspicuous Nazi tattoo on his shoulder. The doctor, after being replaced by a colleague, declared: “I can’t reconcile the surgery with my conscience.” The same conscience that we have imagined prevents our protagonist from rescuing the stranger in the accident».
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