What do we love about loving a person? What do we hold onto? Is it the spiritual dimension of their being, conversations, memories, what we think we know of the other person? Or is there a more solid, corporeal dimension, the mystery that occurs when bodies communicate while other things are being discussed? Piero Messina focuses his second work, Another End, on exploring the relationship between body and conscience (or spirit) and the mystery of what survives when the physical form loses its substance.
The film was shot in Rome and Paris; the cities provide a nameless metropolis, an antiseptic and futuristic non-place of cold light, towering glass skyscrapers and hanging walkways, that represents the dominant role of technology in the world of the main characters who – in contrast – travel in the old carriages of the metro, live in traditional houses and go out at night to places whose walls are covered with graffiti.
What do we love about loving a person? What do we hold onto? Is it the spiritual dimension of their being, conversations, memories, what we think we know of the other person? Or is there a more solid, corporeal dimension, the mystery that occurs when bodies communicate while other things are being discussed? Piero Messina focuses his second work, Another End, on exploring the relationship between body and conscience (or spirit) and the mystery of what survives when the physical form loses its substance.
The film was shot in Rome and Paris; the cities provide a nameless metropolis, an antiseptic and futuristic non-place of cold light, towering glass skyscrapers and hanging walkways, that represents the dominant role of technology in the world of the main characters who – in contrast – travel in the old carriages of the metro, live in traditional houses and go out at night to places whose walls are covered with graffiti.
Sal’s empty eyes come alive only with memories of Zoe, his lost love. These are memories, like fragments of a broken mirror, that cannot be put back together. His sister Ebe, increasingly worried about her brother, suggests trying Another End, a new technology that promises to alleviate the pain of separation by temporarily bringing back the conscience of the deceased. So it is that Sal meets Zoe in the body of another woman. An unknown person in whom he mysteriously recognises his wife. The broken parts suddenly seem to reassemble. But it is a fragile, ephemeral, deceitful joy. Can love really survive as a secret hidden in a body?
