The latest from Marco Bellocchio is this delicate, melancholic, and deeply moving adaptation of Massimo Gramellini’s popular autobiographical novel Sweet Dreams, Little One. Tracing a middle-aged man (Valerio Mastandrea) as he still struggles to come to grips with the sudden loss of his mother when he was nine years old, Sweet Dreams alternates between past and present, memories and dreams, effortlessly weaving together disparate elements of Massimo’s life to yield a profound, poetic study of loss and maternal love.
This is Bellocchio at his most emotional, but his signature sense of humor and irony are as strong as ever.