The twilight of the police hero in Andrea di Stefano’s film "Last Night in Milan": the night Franco Amore (did not) retire(d)

Abstract

In 2023, Italian filmmaker Andrea di Stefano released his third feature film, L’ultima notte di Amore: this thriller tells the story of Franco Amore, a police lieutenant in Milan who, on the night before his retirement, must investigate the murder of his colleague. The narrative structure, based on deconstruction and polyphony, reveals through an extensive flashback Amore’s own involvement in the criminal acts. The originality of this film lies in Di Stefano’s contemporary reinterpretation, in a crime-thriller vein, of the classical poetic rule of the three unities: unity of place (Milan), unity of time (one night), and unity of action (the acts that reveal Amore’s moral ambiguity). This article aims precisely to examine, from a semi-narratological perspective, the body of the city as the setting for this crime fiction, which draws on both Scerbanenco’s gialli and the poliziotteschi of the 1970s. The filming of this sprawling, multicultural territory, where police officers maintain dubious relationships with the Calabrian and Chinese mafias, constitutes the nerve center of an eminently noir cinematic style that, through the audience’s identification with the protagonist, blurs the boundaries between justice and crime.