Tienimi Presente

 “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
 — Samuel Beckett 

There is a peculiar, almost oblique way in which Remember Me (Tienimi presente) looks at cinema: not head-on, not with the fervor of someone claiming it as destiny, but with the caution of someone pretending to have already filed it away. Alberto Palmiero’s debut feature moves precisely within this ambiguous territory, where renunciation is never definitive and disillusion dangerously resembles a survival strategy. Saying “cinema has disappointed me” becomes a protective statement, a way of avoiding the risk of discovering oneself still vulnerable before what one truly desires. 

The film constructs its narrative through a sequence of minimal, seemingly secondary episodes that ultimately compose an oblique, ironic, and melancholic self-portrait. Palmiero develops a form of comedy that never erupts into conventional gags but rather settles gradually into glances, pauses, and awkward silences. It is a gentle grotesque, never aggressive, coexisting with a playful, veiled melancholy, as if the film were constantly afraid of taking itself too seriously — and precisely for that reason, it achieves sincerity. 

The return to provincial life offers no real comfort: it is not an idyllic refuge but a suspended space where time slows down and questions grow louder. Here the film introduces an existential reflection that requires no proclamations: what remains when a dream is placed in parentheses? And above all, what remains of us when the celebration ends? 

It is no coincidence that, while Naples celebrates its championship victory in a collective and almost metaphysical euphoria, the protagonist wonders what survives after the excitement fades, what meaning remains once the chants fall silent. The question, only apparently out of context, becomes one of the film’s philosophical keys: every happiness is temporary, every achievement risks becoming an elegantly decorated void. It therefore becomes more meaningful to reflect not on success, but on the possibility of inhabiting incompleteness. 

Palmiero populates the film with scenes functioning as small devices of self-analysis. On the subway, an elderly man offers him a seat. A simple, almost automatic gesture that transforms into a painful enigma: why him? A friend dismisses the question with a remark that is both cruel and tender — “you look pitiful, but in a good way” — and in that moment the film pinpoints its central concern with surgical precision: the gaze of others becomes a distorting mirror, an involuntary measure of one’s perceived inadequacy. 

The theme returns in an even more ironic form when, asked what he would do if he won a large lottery prize, the protagonist answers without hesitation that he would make a film. Nothing else. The line, delivered with disarming naturalness, reveals the character’s deepest contradiction: he has renounced cinema, yet cannot imagine himself outside it. Even while pretending to turn away, he continues to talk about it, measure himself against it, even attempt to diminish it — as when he obsessively researches the height of great directors and discovers that Martin Scorsese stands just over five feet three inches tall. An insignificant detail that suddenly feels liberating: if giants can be physically small, perhaps the gap is not entirely unbridgeable. 

Meanwhile, “normal” life advances as both temptation and threat. Leaflet distribution, temporary jobs, and the prospect of practical stability become sources of conflict with friends, one of whom refuses to accept this apparent surrender, generating surreal dialogues that seem drawn from a theatre of everyday absurdity. Here Palmiero sharpens a humor built on logical disjunctions, misaligned responses, and conversations that never truly meet — as if language itself were incapable of containing the generational unease the film portrays. 

Equally crucial is the family dimension, portrayed without sentimental indulgence. The parents, filmed in an irresistibly comic domestic vignette, are not symbolic figures but real presences, carrying an unconscious theatricality. The mother invokes practicality, the father observes, comments, corrects. Within these dynamics, the film reaches one of its most authentic moments: the home becomes a film set, the everyday transforms into cinema without needing to declare itself as such. The same occurs when the protagonist adopts an abandoned dog — a simple, almost marginal gesture that acquires ethical and existential significance, as if caring for another living being were a way of reactivating a sense of responsibility that elsewhere seems impossible to exercise. 

Ultimately, Tienimi presente is a film that speaks about cinema while pretending to speak against it. It is a work that reflects on creation through refusal, on ambition through fear, on desire through its denial. Palmiero constructs a fragile, self-critical, never self-indulgent form of metacinema, capable of transforming uncertainty into language and precariousness into form. 

There is an awareness that narrating the instant, the embarrassment, the failed attempt may already be a way of remaining present. And perhaps, in an era that measures everything in terms of results, Tienimi presente discreetly and ironically suggests that existing — even before succeeding — is already a radical act. 

“If you have something to say, say it lightly.”
 — Billy Wilder