Fingernails, Christos Nikou, 2023

At the Love Institute, questionable technology and a rigid path in stages test and certify the sentimental compatibility between two people to avoid crises, breakups and pain. The result is a 'diploma' on paper, in black and white, which defines who can love whom and in what percentage.

Someone said “I don't trust the statistics: a man with his head in the oven and his feet in the freezer statistically has an acceptable average temperature”. And how can you blame him if the data to be processed are linked to feelings, assuming that these can be taken and literally counted on a fingernail.

Love is such because it is not right, it makes no sense, it is unpredictable, it is unexpected, it hurts, it upsets, it disorientates, it calls into question. It is an ever-tight rope that feeds precisely on the possible precariousness of the imminent breakup. Love does not take into account predictions, predictions or expectations, it is anything but measurable and definable. It is the exact opposite of order, it is chaos that follows a single permissible rule, that of attraction. Thus, like gravity, love holds bodies and souls together and makes life possible and worth living.

The more we try to understand love, the more it escapes any analysis or theory. The practice remains: love is a strong feeling that must be experienced in the field and stressed day by day and will always provide a different result. If it is true that some heart problems can be identified by the change in the appearance of the nails, heart problems instead emerge in looks, in words left unfinished, in thoughts repressed, in poorly hidden obsessions, in sentences underlined in books, in song refrains, in apneas, in accelerated beats. Love is a disease and a cure at the same time, just as it is true that the heart is a muscular organ 'capable of generating on its own the nervous stimulus that ensures its movement' in an involuntary manner, because it does not respond to will or reason and his reasons are always unknown. Love is mystery and if love leads us to knowledge and desire, the opposite is not equally true.

Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed brilliantly and silently convey all this tension towards the incomprehensible. Christos Nikou directs a film about love (but not about love) with the intelligent gaze of someone who doesn't know and seeks answers to questions they don't have. Questions that are more relevant than ever in this era in which artifice seems to become more and more a threat and man seeks in his 'human being' a way to counteract and contain it.