Review of Nomadland (2021) by Mauro_Lanari — 02 Jun 2021

(Mauro Lanari).

"Zhao falls into the now usual limits of her cinema: a fragile writing and the difficulty of really dissecting the theme she has chosen" (Alessandro Aniballi). "Nomadland" is not a film about people who are houseless and without a steady job neither by choice nor by no choice. Fern dwells inside a van because she is imprisoned by a trauma that she cannot live with except in a perennial escape. Too private and personal issues to become a representation of the precariousness of existence, among landscape postcards of a nature as majestic as indifferent to the destiny of living beings and in the metaphysical uprooting of a lack of meaning that makes every decision equivalent. In fact, she continues to choose: the nomadic condition in and of the desert, detached from villages and communities in favor of ghost towns, solitude and isolation, abandoning any type of dog to itself. "Nomadland is like Fern, [who] seems to celebrate the feelings [...] of a healthy protest [...] and an unexceptionable autonomy of thought," while she is antipathetic to the limit of an asocial, authoritarian and selfish anaffectivity (Pier Maria Bocchi).