Self-indulgence drowns out the proposals of Ildiko Enyedi and Franco Maresco, who close out a competition chaired by The Voice of Hind, about the genocide in Gaza.

Ambition, like love, is often (and should be) the starting point for what is unavoidable. It's not necessary to get this phrase tattooed, but, if necessary, it's always better than a tribal tattoo, wings, a wild animal, or a gnome. I could go on, but the idea is clear. Not to mention a trompe l'oeil, a mother's heart, or a skull. Enough. The last day of competition featured two films as ambitious as they were disproportionate. And hardly tattooable. They wouldn't fit on your arm. And that, make no mistake, is a good thing. Silent Friend , by Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi, is, according to the director herself, about the human being. And Un film fatto per bene (A Film Made for the Good—or for Good, which is the name of the protagonist), by Franco Maresco, is basically a manifesto against current cinema. Exactly. It's worth adding that the Chinese film The Sun Rises on Us All , by Chinese filmmaker Cai Shangjun, is also no slouch. Its plot is about forgiveness. And old-fashioned love. As I said, ambition doesn't allow for tattoos.

Silent Friend, the latest work by the 2017 Golden Bear winner for On Body and Soul , tells the story of the people surrounding a single tree in three time periods (1908, 1972, and 2020), a majestic ginkgo that stands at a German university completely allergic to the passage of time. In the first case, the story concerns the first female botany student to set foot in such noble classrooms; in the second, everything revolves around a couple determined to communicate with a geranium (just like that), and in the third, a researcher attempts to establish hypersensory contact (or something similar) with the tree in question. Everything revolves around the concept of nature, of life, of an interconnected universe. That or the human being, as the ambitious filmmaker says.

The film, like his previous and failed work , *The Story of My Wife*, wants it all, if not everything, then a good part of it. From the microscopic shots (the most suggestive, without a doubt) to the setting in three different textures for each era, *Silent Friend* advances across the screen at the slow pace of life itself, a life that literally crackles, roars, stretches, and explodes both in the smallest, almost invisible parts, and on the surface of one's own skin. And it's surprising. The problem, by no means a minor one, is the merciless and very condescending pace that the film imposes on itself, convinced as it is of its importance to exasperating extremes. And majestically boring, in truth. The ambition directly falls on the viewer over the course of two and a half hours of a narrative as erratic as it is lacking in pulse. Too bad.

A fatto per bene film: The self-parody of parody is... excessive (***)

Maresco's case is different for the simple reason that the director of films like Lo zio di Brooklyn (1995) and Totò che vise due volte (1998) has nothing to do with anything. Not even with himself, if you ask yourself. His is an enthusiastic vindication of the ugly, the raw, the wild, and the frontier. His is a comedy of pure tragedy. Now he's proposing something like a testamentary film where he reviews his own life while playing cinema within cinema. During the filming of a movie about a kind of mad saint who goes by the name of Carmelo Bene, the director (that is, Franco Maresco himself) disappears. What follows is a punctual account of all the accidents of a failure that, by extension, aims to be the most terroristic possible explanation of how bad and terrible contemporary Italian cinema is. It sounds tremendous, ambitious, no doubt, and it is.

This time, the problems arise from the self-condescension, if not outright narcissism, with which the director presents himself as a hero sacrificing his own story. It's not one of the greatest examples of shamelessness seen recently, but it comes pretty close. That said, when Un film fatto per bene (A Film Fatto Per Bene) tries to be funny, rowdy, brutal, and very Palermo-esque, it certainly succeeds. The episode with the film critic (always them) seems to be the most hilarious of the Mostra. There weren't any great occasions either, to be honest.

The sun rises on us all: A melodrama as raw as it is out of control (***)

The day concluded with The Sun Rises on Us All , and, in keeping with his colleagues, the director of such notable films as People Mountain, People Sea (2011) offers the closest thing to a tragedy outside the norm, without limits, and without a sense of proportion. Two old lovers reunite after so many years. He is suffering from cancer after spending a long time in prison, and she is about to marry another man. They are linked by a past crime (a hit-and-run) for which he took the blame for her, the one who was driving. The rest is more than a drama and aims to be much more than a simple melodrama. Ambition, again.

Despite performances tailored to the most intimate and ferocious unreason by Xin Zhilei and Zhang Songwen, and despite the unfeigned gravity of the proposal, Cai Shangjun's film fails to control its tendency toward excess. The register it proposes is neither Sirkian (of Douglas Sirk) nor much less ironic. The line is always veristic and crude and plays in the opposite direction of the incredible cascade of misfortunes that soak, and even hinder, everything.

And so it was, a competition section concluded in which two films stood out above all others. Something very unusual would have to happen for The Voice of Hind, by Kaouther Ben Hania, to not take home the Golden Lion. Both for the radical nature of the proposal between reality and fiction, and the bleedingly timely nature of the plot (the genocide in Gaza), it seems unrivaled. It's ambitious, yes, but, above all, it is what it should be here and now. The second film to stand out in a high-caliber Mostra, although without quite breaking away from that definitive production, is Jim Jarmusch's return to his best register with Father, Mother, Sister, Brother. The list of winners will be on Saturday. We'll get it tattooed on our faces.