On the set of the new film, due out in 2023, based on his novel. Neri Marcor Giovanni, a PCI militant who goes into a coma at the age of 18 at Berlinguer’s funeral and wakes up in 2015
Rome, 13 June 1984, piazza San Giovanni in Laterano. Mixed with the one and a half million people gathered to pay the last homage to Enrico Berlinguer, who died two days earlier due to an illness, there is also Giovanni. He is 18, a girlfriend, friends and family who love him. The flagstick falls on his head, he goes into a coma. He will only wake up in 2015. An 18 year old in the body of a 49 year old man who left the world in the early 1980s and finds him radically changed. Walter Veltroni speaks from the set of When, the film based on his novel released in 2017, produced by Lumire, will be released in theaters at the beginning of 2023 with Vision. These are the last days of filming. Giovanni Neri Marcor. It is up to him to get used to the new that has advanced in over thirty years. He must overcome the shock of those who have skipped three decades, must make his mental age coincide with his real one – explains the actor -. Take note of what happened to him and to the country. His girlfriend at the time, and mother of daughter, got together with his best friend. The PCI, the party to which he dedicated his efforts and hopes, is no more. Life went on without him. But, assures Veltroni, there is no room for nostalgia. As there was none in the book. I can’t feel nostalgic for that era. I do not think at all that life was better. Those were the years of Sindona, Andreotti, the mafia, P2, terrorism. I believe that the years between 1978, the Moro kidnapping and 1984, the death of Berlinguer, when the PCI actually dies, are central to our history. Maybe I might be nostalgic for what could have been and not been, that yes, of what was not. And one can regret the great passions and the lost sense of community. In one scene we will see Giovanni returning to Botteghe Oscure, the historic headquarters of the PCI, an address now like many others. He too asks himself some questions: where are all those people who were in San Giovanni? What is left? But not nostalgic. It couldn’t be. a boy, looks to the future, searches in the people around him for the values to which he had consecrated his life.
Solarino’s words
Like Giulia (Valeria Solarino), the nun who has assisted him in recent years. And that she has come to know him better than anyone else. When Walter offered me the role, I was scared: I am far from the Catholic world. Then I realized that more than talking, as I had done, with a catechist friend, I had to understand who Giulia was. A woman who is totally dedicated to others. She has the same background as Giovanni, she comes from a communist family. When he wakes up she wants to protect him from his morbid curiosity, give him time to realize what happened. The key to their relationship is the exchange: she told him a lot about herself while he was in a coma. was his confidant, explains Veltroni. She looked after him like a mother but younger, a younger sister. She accompanies him in his rebirth with Leo, an 18-year-old boy who does not speak because he thinks no one is listening. They recognize each other, they have the same candor. They are a picaresque couple. The tone, he says, a bit fairytale. As a director I love this dimension, nothing more realistic than the imagination as Fellini said, I agree. Any reference to Goodbye Lenin, he says, must be reversed. There was the need to rebuild the world as it was, here to tell what it has become, a forest full of pitfalls. To help Giovanni review the lost decades, Leo shows him pictures on his tablet: the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlusconi as Prime Minister, on 11 September. But, above all, there is the life of John. That he has to take his final exams – one of the most important scenes – to find loved ones, his mother and father for example, says Veltroni. He is also working on two new documentaries. One on Paolo Rossi and the other on Pio La Torre. Memory, together with teamwork, is the thing that is closest to my heart, in everything I have done: politics, journalism, writing, cinema. Against this Boeotian presentism. Pay homage to those who made a difference, such as Pio La Torre. If you stop someone on the street and ask him who he was, he doesn’t know.
August 3, 2022 (change August 4, 2022 | 08:10)
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