Pupi Avati, at eighty-five, still amazes. L’orto americano, the closing film of the Festival shown yesterday at the Lido, is shot in a crazy black and white, rich, complex, full of chiaroscuro like a photograph by Ansel Adams. And Avati manages to make us feel exactly what a teenager feels when he falls in love, when he “thinks that the person promised by destiny has arrived”. He does it, as if that adolescence was still, fully, inside him. As if it had never gone away.
It is the opening scene, set in the days of the Liberation, in Emilia. A girl, in an auxiliary uniform, looks out to ask for directions in a barber’s shop. One look is enough for her to make a young aspiring writer, played by Filippo Scotti, fall in love. Then, the story takes a completely different turn: it becomes a gothic thriller, a story of eroticism and murder, of dead people who do not want to die, of reality and deceptions of the mind. But those first images remain in the memory.
“No one today can imagine how strong and burning the love, the infatuation of those years, was”, says Pupi Avati. “The infatuation that involved “chasing”. I chased a girl, Paola Zuccotti, via Andrea Costa 22. I stood at the door of her house, and when she went out at 5 pm I followed her, from afar: she went to church, to the haberdashery, to the stationery shop… I was in love, and I didn’t dare talk to her. And yet, no one can imagine how strong that infatuation was, how absolute it was”.
Avati’s new film The American Garden, which will be released in theaters with 01 in February 2025, brings the director back to the Lido – who holds the record for participations at the Festival (ten in the official selection) – and in some ways also brings him back to his origins, to The House with Laughing Windows, a 1976 horror film that won the Critics’ Award at the Festival du Film Fantastique in Paris, later becoming a cult. The protagonist of The American Garden sees the character played by Filippo Scotti talking to the dead. “It’s something I do too,” reveals Pupi Avati. “On a wall in my house, I have portraits of all the people who were dear to me, first and foremost my parents, and I talk to them. As I approach the last part of my life, I’m no longer afraid of sincerity. And I honestly tell you that I talk to the dead.”
There is something Hitchcockian in the black and white of Avati’s film, in that little wooden house that reminds us a bit of Psycho. And perhaps there is also some similarity in the lives of the two directors: both very shy, insecure, embarrassed during adolescence by their physical appearance. And both capable of overturning their ghosts in the films they created.
“I was a shy human being with a huge inferiority complex about my appearance,” says Avati. “But I am proof that miracles exist. The miracle of someone who sold fish fingers, and who today has made 55 films, because he had the strength to dream, and also to be unreasonable.” The reference to fish fingers alludes to when, before dedicating himself to cinema, Pupi Avati was an employee in the frozen food department of a supermarket, but he dreamed of music – he played in a jazz band – and cinema.
“It was difficult to put together the Italian post-war period, the rubble of the American bombings, with a gothic film, a film that had its own tension”, explains Avati about The American Garden. “Black and white helped us a lot. There are some shots that have remained with me since I was a kid, going to film clubs. There are many moments that are not mine, but belong to the cinema of directors older than me. I discovered, at this age, that black and white is more intensely cinema than color films. Black and white creates an elsewhere, something that goes beyond reality. And that is cinema: the elsewhere. Loves that last forever, or someone who talks to the dead”.