Still life (2013)

John is a civial servants whose job it is to track down the relatives of recently deceased people. In his job, he learns about loneliness. People who have been so lonely that there are nobody who attend their funerals. John - played gracefully by Eddie Marsan - is a lonely guy himself. He has no family, no friends. His bosses thinks that he is doing an unnecessary job, but he is engaged in what he does, in finding family members of the dead. His way of going about his often rather dreary and sad business exudes a sense of vocation. John is made redundant, and is allowed to solve one last case. He goes on a journey which is dangerously close to drowning the film in sugarcoated resolutions. But these clichés are warded off. Uberto Pasolini's Still life may not be a masterpiece, but is is a haunting portrait of loneliness and unexpected encounters between people. The pure, unhurried style of the film serves the material well. It turns out that Pasolini also directed The Full Monty. Rugged realism may connect the two films, but in every other way, they are miles apart.