The Place (2017)

Directed by: Paolo Genovese | 105 minutes | drama | Actors: Valerio Mastandrea, Marco Giallini, Alessandro Borghi, Silvio Muccino, Alba Rohrwacher, Vittoria Puccini, Sabrina Ferilli, Silvia D’Amico, Rocco Papaleo, Giulia Lazzarini, Vinicio Marchioni, Marianne Mirage

The man receives his customers somewhere in the back of café-restaurant The Place. This modern establishment is a kind of European variation on the American diner. The man at the back of the shop helps his customers to be happy. They tell him what they lack and then he tells him that he can help, provided the customers complete an assignment successfully. For example, there is an elderly woman who wants her husband to be cured of Alzheimer’s. The man says he can take care of that. All the woman has to do is detonate a bomb in a restaurant.

Thus begins the Italian feature film ‘The Place’, based on the American television series ‘The Booth at the End’. After that we will stay at the same location for 1 hour and 45 minutes. ‘The Place’ consists entirely of the stories the customers tell the man and the questions the man asks them. Although he is not a psychologist, lawyer, therapist or journalist, he still writes everything down in his notebook. We don’t always see new customers, but about ten customers who keep coming back and informing the man about the progress of their assignment.

To bring this original but oh so risky concept to a successful conclusion you need two things: great stories and ditto actors. In both respects ‘The Place’ succeeds with highest praise. We won’t reveal anything about the stories, but the assignments that the customers receive are often just as extreme as the woman who has to detonate a bomb. That she has to do so does not stem from terrorist or criminal motives, but from something completely different. It soon becomes apparent that the assignments are intended to really help the customers. And to make it even more exciting, it turns out after a while that some assignments interfere with each other or are in line with each other.

The actors, who act more or less like storytellers here, do it all perfectly. With the great Alba Rohrbacher at the front, as a nun who wants to find her God. But Silvia d’Amico also plays a wonderful role as the energetic and touching Martina. Valerio Mastandrea plays the man in the back of the cafe with a mix of empathy, business and honesty. No one else knows who he is, but slowly but surely we are getting an idea in which direction we should look.

If it was only about the stories in ‘The Place’, we would already have a wonderful film. But among those stories we discern the true subjects of ‘The Place’, the pursuit of happiness and love, the acceptance of the irrevocable, the impossible dilemmas that sometimes confront us. And all served with humor, great dialogue, everyday wisdom and original ideas. And also within an impossible concept. How on earth did the makers manage this? Maybe the man in the back of the cafe knows the answer.