Leonora Addio

Leonora addio

Umberto Montiroli

VERDICT: On his first completely solo flight directing without his late brother, Paolo Taviani pays a stirring salute to Sicily's great novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello.

One of the most astonishing things about the way Paolo and Vittorio Taviani worked together on 19 feature films was their almost unbelievable symbiosis of thought and intent, a harmony so strong it allowed them to take turns directing not just scenes, or even shots, but single takes of a shot. Although Vittorio’s illness made Paolo the de facto sole director on their final film, the Italian partisan story Rainbow—A Private Affair (2018), Leonora Addio marks the first time Paolo has been completely on his own as a writer and director. It will come as no surprise that the signature Taviani style of storytelling is very much present, as is the balancing of innocence and realism in characters who always have something theatrical about them, so the audience will never forget they are fictional.

Looked at this way, the Tavianis have always had a lot of Pirandello in them, most explicitly in their Sicilian-set Kaos (1984) — one of their most beloved films — based on the writer’s short stories, but more generally in their Brechtian, non-realistic approach to narrative. Here the screenplay makes the startling choice to split itself into two parts. The first, longer section, shot in near black and white, tells the true story of what became of Pirandello’s ashes after his death in 1936, an odyssey almost as bizarre as Eva Peron’s post-mortem meanderings. Then, just when it reaches its powerful, paradoxical conclusion, the screen bursts into color and a completely different tale begins, based on the writer’s last story “The Nail” which is set between Sicily and Brooklyn. Both stories are exquisitely and vigorously told, and their disconcerting lack of symmetry is bridged by their tie-in to the author’s native land.

This is the fourth time a Taviani film has been in the Berlin Film Festival, the last being Caesar Must Die in which prison inmates perform a Shakespeare play, which won the Golden Bear in 2012. The subtle power of the present film, centered on death and dedicated to Vittorio, will surely have a good shot at the competition awards.

The story of Pirandello’s ashes begins with archive footage (the first of many newsreels in the film) of the writer in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in a formal ceremony. It’s 1934, Mussolini and the Fascists are in control of Italy, and he looks ill at ease. “I never felt so alone and sad,” he will write. “The sweet roses of glory can’t compensate for what it cost,” alluding perhaps to his own career-advancing flirtation with Fascism. Two years later he is on his deathbed, surrounded by his three children who he imagines first as small kids, then as young adults. Though his last testament stipulates that he be cremated and his ashes buried in a Greek vase back in Sicily where he was born, fate takes a ludicrous turn. First Mussolini demands he be given a “fascist funeral” in Rome, but his children, unable to travel, manage to give the ashes a temporary resting place in a Roman cemetery. As the war is ending, a group of students seeks permission to move them to Sicily – but first the authorities object that Pirandello was an anti-fascist, then immediately after the war, that he was a fascist. (They’re both right: he was a member of the party for three years before publicly tearing up his membership card.)

Taviani concentrates much of the story on a professor (a dignified, long-suffering Fabrizio Ferracane) who ultimately gets the green light to open the tomb and transfer the ashes to Pirandello’s Greek vase, which he nails inside a huge packing crate. A special flight to Palermo aboard an American military plane is arranged by the new republican government. But when the other passengers see that “a dead man is aboard”, they superstitiously hurry to disembark and even the U.S. Army pilot shuts down the engines. As unlikely as that sounds, it makes a good story, which continues through many more plot twists, including the refusal of a Catholic bishop (Claudio Bigagli) to bless a Greek vase with a cremated body in it. Almost drained of color, the sharp and evocative images credited to cinematographers Paolo Carnera and Simone Zampagni are a skip away from the black and white of newsreels and, especially, the many snatches of period films, especially the great neorealist works, that dot the tale with the authentic atmosphere of an authoritarian society changing into a democratic one.

Quite unexpectedly, the screen fills with brown and maroon hues to recount the bitter rendezvous with destiny between an Italian boy in his early teens and two young girls who are fiercely fighting in an empty lot. The place is Brooklyn in 1867, around the time of Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, which has certainly influenced the episode’s informal look and the Italian and Irish immigrants who populate it. Bastianeddu is a child when his father is forced to leave Sicily to look for work. As he departs on a ship of hungry immigrants bound for America, he tears the boy from his mother and takes him with him. Ten years later, the boy (a winsomely handsome Matteo Pittiruti) is a waiter in Dad’s new Brooklyn restaurant, but behind his light-heartedness festers a wound of loss that will never heal.

The contrasting lighting that spills stark illumination on small parts of the screen while leaving the rest in black darkness is particularly pronounced in the dramatic moments of “The Nail”, and its refined suggestion of classic Italian art is matched by one of Nicola Piovani’s most gentle, haunting scores. The music ties these Sicilian tales to many other Taviani works, recalling Piovani’s accompaniment to Kaos and The Night of the Shooting Stars.

Director, screenplay: Paolo Taviani
Cast: Fabrizio Ferracane, Matteo Pittiruti, Dania Marino, Dora Becker, Claudio Bigagli, Roberto Herlitzka, Robert Steiner, Enrico Mario Modugno, Jessica Piccolo Valerani
Producer: Donatella Palermo
Cinematography: Paolo Carnera, Simone Zampagni
Production design: Emita Frigato
Costume design: Lina Nerli Taviani
Editing: Roberto Perpignani
Music: Nicola Piovani
Production company/companies: Stemal Entertainment (Italy) in association with Rai Cinema, Luce Cinecittà, Cinemaundici
World sales: Fandango (Italy)
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In Italian and Sicilian dialect
90  minutes