Writing about a genius like Luigi Pirandello who didn’t give answers but mostly asked amusing questions, set himself the goal of telling his story from a new point of view, the one enclosed within the walls of his home, involving actresses and actors like Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Fabrizio Bentivoglio, not it’s easy. It’s for dreamers and Michele Placidodirector of Eternal Visionary, premiered at the nineteenth edition of the Rome Film Festival (it will arrive in cinemas from 7 November), he still dreams strongly. Pirandello would scare everyone, but not him. Pirandello is in every actor who plays his film, Pirandello is Michele Placido, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Federica Luce Vincenti, who in addition to playing Pirandello’s artistic muse and forbidden love, Marta Abba, was also a producer of the film for Goldenart Production (with Rai Cinema in co-production with GapBusters, an Italian-French co-production of the Community of Belgium).
Pirandello is still us who ask ourselves and find answers far away, in society. «Over the years I understood that he was my spiritual father»says the director. «I always have on my bedside table, like the Gospel let’s say, Pirandello texts, Pirandello books, Pirandello poetry. He wanted to show what wasn’t working in his life and had to make a qualitative leap only by finding the courage to put his family problems on stage. That was a stepping stone but he did it because he needed it. We have to slap the public, we don’t have to please the public. Only in this way will the public understand and understand their problems.”
The film, written by Placido, Matteo Collura and Toni Trupia, unfolds during the journey that the brilliant and tormented Pirandello faces, by train, to go and receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm. It was November 8, 1934 when the Swedish Academy awarded him the most important prize in the world, «For his daring and ingenious renewal of dramatic and theatrical art». A renewal that cost him pain, especially in the relationship with his wife Antonietta Portulano, played by the amazing and always surprising Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, destined to be admitted to a clinic for those suffering from mental illnesses, due to her delirium. Antonietta loves her Luigi deeply and eternally, despite remaining incapable of understanding and accepting the life choice of that predestined artist.
«It wasn’t the first time I “entered” the bedroom of Pirandello and his wife Antonietta», Valeria Bruni Tedeschi said. «I had already done it thirty years ago with Fabrizio Bentivoglio in Bellocchio’s film The Nurseand therefore I had the impression of entering the same room thirty years later. What struck me most about the script was discovering how Antonietta’s madness, which remained unexploded for so long in her youth, finds its definitive outburst in old age, leading her to say all the most annoying things that had never been said before.” And in front of which, Pirandello, husband and father with a controversial relationship with his children (in the film played by Aurora Giovinazzo, Giancarlo Commare, Michelangelo Placido) is unable to respond, except by running away.
«At school they make us read his works straight away» comments Fabrizio Bentivoglio, «but they almost never talk to us about the lives of these great artists. I think that to fully understand the poetics of an author like Pirandello it is impossible to separate his life from his works. It is only through the study of his life that we realize that it was the first source of inspiration for his writing.” As Eternal Visionary exhibition, moving between Rome, Stockholm, Berlin and Sicily, an authentic portrait of Luigi Pirandello, of his art, metamorphosis (also) of unhappiness.
Source: Vanity Fair
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