Like Crazy (2016)

Paolo Virzi's Like Crazy, released in its native Italy as La pazza gioia, follows two women who meet inside a Tuscan psychiatric facility and then leave it together. Beatrice is a wealthy, voluble fantasist. Donatella is a withdrawn young mother with a history of institutional care. The film sends them into the Italian countryside in a borrowed van, and the resulting road movie is warm, episodic, and content to let its leads carry the weight. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Micaela Ramazzotti are given room to be messy, and they take it.

The film's political instincts are modest and largely structural. It places two women at the center of a story that belongs to them, gives their friendship the seriousness usually reserved for romance, and lets the men in their lives (a violent husband, a cold father, a series of indifferent officials) stand as obstacles instead of saviors. That is a quiet critique of patriarchal control, though it arrives dressed as character drama and never announces itself as a thesis. The setting inside a mental institution does more visible work. Patients are shown as funny, cruel, tender, and fully human, and the film treats their conditions with sympathy instead of spectacle. It predates the vocabulary now used to discuss such things, but the impulse is recognizable.

The film's omissions are instructive. The cast is uniformly white and the story has no interest in race, class warfare, environmental anxiety, or the politics of the body. Its social commentary on mental health care surfaces through plot and performance, never through speeches. The result is a humane, well-acted, faintly old-fashioned picture, one that stirs progressive feeling without ever organizing it into a program.