THE FILM VERDICT: You worked a great deal in theater before starting to direct movies in 1992. Why do you make films? What do they give you?
MARIO MARTONE: In reality, cinema is the engine powering all my work. I was a boy in the ’80s when I started directing plays, and my theater is full of cinema. I’m not an actor. On stage, the director is more on the sidelines because there are actors on stage. In the movies, I feel fully involved.
TFV: It’s been an exceptional year for you: The King of Laughter in competition at Venice, then you immediately shot Nostalgia, which was invited to compete at Cannes, just as you were starting to rehearse Rigoletto at la Scala in Milan…
MM: One thing nourishes another. It doesn’t take away energy; it multiplies it. I’m so happy about Nostalgia because it touches viewers’ hearts. The star Pierfrancesco Favino and I experienced a profound emotion making it, and we transmitted this feeling to the audience — there’s nothing better.
TFV: Nostalgia is about a man suspended between two places [Naples and North Africa] and two religions [Catholicism and Islam]. What about you?
MM: I, too, often feel like a stranger in my own land. The main character of my first film, Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician, was also a foreigner in his country. I’m Neapolitan, yet something of an outsider. Maybe that’s why I felt so close to my film L’amore molesto [Troubling Love] based on the novel by Elena Ferrante, who is a Neapolitan yet an outsider in her city. In Ermanno Rea’s novel on which Nostalgia is based, I felt similar chords resonate inside me.
TFV: In Nostalgia, the main character played by Favino enters the world of Naples, only to find himself in an Exterminating Angel situation in which he can no longer leave the place; an all-powerful force stops him, as though he were entrapped in a Greek myth with his childhood friend Orestes.
MM: It’s very true he’s entrapped and there’s no rational explanation for what prevents him from leaving the city. Once his mother dies, there’s no reason he should stay on those poor back streets. We see how he lives in Cairo – his rich house, his modern wife who loves him – so what is this nostalgia? When I read the novel, I saw a chance to put two labyrinths on the screen. A real one, in the closed enclave of the Rione Sanità neighborhood where the film was entirely shot. Then there was the inner labyrinth of the character, his past. Everyone’s past is a labyrinth: the choices we made and failed to make, the encounters we had, and those we missed. Inside this labyrinth is a minotaur, Orestes, who is waiting for him. So there is a mythic dimension, yet it’s all taken from reality, his abandoning his past.
It was a great thing to work with an extraordinary actor like Pierfrancesco Favino. His character isn’t a hero. There’s nothing macho about him, or the way he takes care of his mother… So in order to describe nostalgia, it was necessary to describe his interiority on screen.
TFV: It’s very interesting, and perhaps unique in Italian cinema, that the character is a Muslim and speaks Arabic.
MM: The book is about a man who lives in North Africa and tells the story of his life there. I wanted to make a film that was essential and mysterious. The man has lived in an Arab culture for forty years and married a Egyptian woman; he’s a Muslim culturally speaking. This is delicately suggested (this is not in the book) when he dances with the young people from the neighborhood to Arab music. The rione is a poor, ancient, mixed quarter which is strangely modern, suggesting the possible future of Naples lies in a meeting of different cultures, in an encounter without hostility. The Catholic priest is a wonderful character based on the real Father Loffredo, who has done so much for the neighborhood. A very concrete priest who fights a continual social battle in Rione Sanità, where poverty and criminality reign.
TFV: What’s next on your agenda?
MM: I’m editing a documentary on actor and comedian Massimo Troisi, who I knew. February marks the 70th anniversary of his birth. I’ve always loved his films and I want to try to recount my feelings towards them. It will be ready for February.
