It has a certain effect to write on the new film «dei» Taviani speaking in the singular. Yet the ghost of Vittorio (who passed away four years ago) hovers throughout Paolo’s film, starting with the initial dedication of «Leonora addio», simple, handwritten, which goes straight to the heart. Yes, because through the curious and paradoxical story of Pirandello’s ashes, tossed between Rome and Sicily over thirty years (30s-40s-50s) – in what was a very “Pirandellian” story – Taviani once again cast a glance on Italy, on the world, on time, on death, on the earth, on those who remain and those who leave. And he did it with a lightness, a poetry, an immediacy that only the great masters know how to have in the face of the elusive complexity of reality and history. Impossible not to see in this film a force that comes from afar, that of Neorealism, which here is not the tired repetition of a formula, but the embodiment of an idea of cinema that the Tavianis have never abandoned. And it is not so much (or only) a question of assembling in the flow of the story some sequences of the films that once were (including their Pirandellian «Kaos») as of making images, “Rossellinian”, an instrument of knowledge.
Whether it is the hopeful faces of two boys in love who return to Sicily from the war front on a train that looks like a cattle car, or the disappointment and disbelief of a middle-aged official who sees himself “stolen” box with ashes inside, or the smiles of two children who laugh at the “coffin of a dwarf” on a balcony, or the dust of a road, the majesty of a rock, the fragility of a reed bent by the wind , that is, in short, all the great beauty of reality … here all this does nothing but transform, in front of Paolo Taviani’s camera, into pure cinematic essence. And that is, in that matter and in that light that everything they manage to transfigure and leave in time and space, with the illusion of defeating death. That the meaning of that farewell that appears in the title is all here? Maybe. But just look up, towards the frescoed ceiling of a theater, hear the applause, and leave nothing behind, to hope that this illusions will still last. Maybe forever.
Direction: Paolo Taviani; Interpreters: Fabrizio Ferracane, Matteo Pittiruti, Diana Marino; Film script: Paolo Taviani; Photography: Paolo Carnera; Editing: Roberto Perpignani; Scenography: Emita Frigato; Costumes: Lina Nerli Taviani. Distribution: 01. Italy, France, 90 ‘, 2021.
In Florence it is in these rooms: Portico.
February 18, 2022 | 16:41
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