2024-01-17 11:27:11
by Valerio Cappelli
«It seems a lot like Paris», a bittersweet story about a divided family. The director: «I rediscover feelings, classic comedy suffers»
ROME «It’s the first time I’ve left the cabaret, I was attached to jesterism», says Leonardo Pieraccioni. In his film on the road, «It Looks Like Paris» (starting tomorrow in 450 theaters for 01), he makes a U-turn towards the bittersweet, but it is more «sour» than sweet.
A swerve because the comedy no longer appeals?
«The public has become disaffected. The window to see them has shortened, after three months you have them comfortable at home, comedy films are the ones that suffer the most, because it is thought that superheroes or floods perform better on the big screen. But even a laugh alone or among 500 people is something else.”
Is Pieraccioni different because he is close to 60?
«I have always been afraid of feelings and sentimentality. Instead I got excited. I wrote the screenplay with Alessandro Riccio precisely because he has never seen one of my films.”
After fifteen films…
«I made my debut thirty years ago with “The Graduates”, telling the story of the worries of a 30-year-old who declares himself out of step in life, and perhaps I will make a sequel to see what happened to him and the others. Then the beautiful love stories of 40 year olds with doors that closed and you wondered, will they live happily ever after? At 50, my daughter Martina told me: you were a father who could have given more.”
And now there is a harsh, cynical father.
«…Nino Frassica, retired professor. Absent, grumpy, almost blind, having his third heart attack, half dead. And then the idea of a trip to Paris with the three children who had lost sight of each other took shape, a trip all together, me Chiara Francini and Giulia Bevilacqua, in a camper. But they don’t leave my stables. The father sees the lights of Pisa at night and says: Paris is always beautiful. We don’t know whether he believes it or not, it’s not important. The beautiful thing is that he finally opened up to a smile.”
And the bitterness between them is smoothed out.
«A friend told me after the preview: do you know that I have to start talking to my sister again? If this film serves as a starting point for the family after a Christmas gone badly, I will have made the best film of my life. Yesterday my teenage daughter while she was brushing her teeth before going to sleep with the toothbrush in her mouth told me: look, I will always be there for you. The film is inspired by a true story from the 1980s. I had filed it away in a drawer as a daring subject. But if I hadn’t made this film, it would have gone against me.”
It’s a story about regrets and the unsaid of a family. How did it go at her house?
«Even when I stopped studying, very early, my parents saw me as a good boy. I worked as a warehouse worker for five years, then I worked in a carpentry shop. It was a way to make me understand that the life of a non-graduate was difficult. In the meantime my father had found me a job as an usher in a bank. For those who came from a humble family, a permanent job was the best. I told him that I had a hard time imagining myself in an usher’s uniform and he understood me.”
When he began to be an actor…
«My parents never pointed out that I had won my Superenalotto. They always made me feel grounded. Now I have my mother, who continues to look at me as if I were 14 years old, judging me for how I behave with my daughter and with Laura, my daughter’s mother.”
He was lucky.
«We laughed a lot at home, we lived in a working class neighborhood of Florence, all my life I tried to reproduce the sound of that laughter. It felt like being on the set of My Friends.”
Nino Frassica is not the first one we think of as a gruff and cynical father.
«If someone is born a stand-up comedian, he suffers like a beast not to do it. I asked him: do you want to lie down in a grubby camper? Comedians have the colors of drama, while the opposite procedure does not happen. The result is that when De Niro, one of the five best actors in the world, plays the comic gangster, he is no longer himself, he loses naturalness. Sordi deserved two Oscars for “Un bourgeois piccolo piccolo” or “Detainee awaiting trial”.
Ceccherini is the bad guy.
«Now he has become a sort of lay priest, he lives in a small village above Pistoia, drinks almost only water and lives in symbiosis with the dog, he even sleeps with it. Since he worked with Garrone on the writing of “I Captain”, he is terrified that he would have to leave the dog so he can’t take it on the red carpet in Hollywood.”
Does comedy have to take political correctness into account?
«It’s become a folklore thing. The editor thought about cutting the scene where a sister was punched. I explained to her that the cuff unites them, and she laughs about it.”
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January 17, 2024 (modified January 17, 2024 | 10:26)
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