Luigi Lo Cascio: passion without borders

This article was published in n. 28 of 2019

Welcome to the North. Luigi Lo Cascio, fresh from the Taormina victory of a Nastro d’argento for The traitor by Marco Bellocchio, where he plays the mafia turncoat Totuccio Contorno, changes language and region and moves to Val Varaita (province of Cuneo), protagonist of Stone eater.In the film, which comes out July 18, Lo Cascio is a passer, makes migrants cross the border towards France: very bearded, silent, the few words he utters are almost as incomprehensible as the Palermo man from Contorno. A rock man very different from the actor (looking much younger than his 51 years), who shows up clean-shaven and hot in the bar of a theater splitting the minutes despite declaring himself a chronic latecomer, «someone who makes people wait and not hear back, but why I always have a lot of work.”

Because, in a book so full of work, he included Cesare, the protagonist of the Stone eater and so far from the characters he has accustomed us to, starting with Peppino Impastato One hundred steps?
«Cesare and I are very different: he is done with society and has no friends, while I like the city, the people, the meetings. When the director Nicola Bellucci called me and I had the script with this physically strong character, who crosses the mountains at night under the snow, I thought that maybe it wasn’t him I should play.”

He was wrong.«The hardest impact was the physical difficulty, the fatigue for me, a Sicilian, of working at twenty degrees below zero, every day and even some nights. Furthermore, I had to have mastery of the body also from an expressive point of view, I couldn’t just wrap myself up, especially since my character is a mountain man, he always has his jacket open and without a hat.”

And the language, in your opinion Sicilian who migrated to Rome?
«I don’t have a particular ability to mimic dialects. Others, like Gifuni or Favino, who were in class with me at the Academy, are very good. I need a study and for example in this case I don’t reproduce the language philologically, but I use a more generic Northern sound.”

Another image of her that we missed is the long beard with which she acts.«I imagined an immobile, rigid person. Inorganic matter provides you with the first suggestion, as my teacher Orazio Costa taught, which you then transfer into the psychic and expressive sphere. For me, Cesare at the beginning was an unscratchable piece of rock, turned to stone due to very great pains.”

The whole film moves on the border: the one that separates Italy and France, but also the one between law and transgression. Do you love crossing borders, going beyond?
“Always. The boundaries are those that lead the actor to transform himself by seeking an expansion of himself, an enlargement. I can’t help but go too far when in the theatre, instead of the usual 500-600 words I use to speak, I have to express myself with Shakespeare’s vocabulary. I am a trifle compared to Peppino Impastato, to Nicola Carati of Better youthto Domenico Lopresti of We believedall giants.”

Is it frustrating to feel like a trifle?
It’s exhilarating. To be frustrated, all you have to do is enter a bookshop or see an exhibition. We are tiny compared to this, but the greatness is that we have the possibility of being spectators, readers.”

What if we were talking about personal trespasses?
«They are difficult, because we are not very willing to change. The birth of children was a trespass. The relationship with my wife (Desire Rayner, ed.) is a horizontal relationship: me, her, the two of us on equal terms. Instead, when Tommaso Isidoro and Arturo Tito were born (7 and 5 yearsed.), for the first time I thought I was less important than someone else, there was a small removal of selfishness, of feeling at the center of the scene.”

For an actor it is inevitable to feel at the center of the scene.
«The actor cannot help but want to show himself, to perform: one’s own gaze is not enough. Narcissus reflects himself in a mirror, but whoever acts must be looked at by the greatest number of people, otherwise he collapses, as if his identity were missing.

In the film, the migrant’s gaze and his pain also have an impact.
«If the photo of a dead child on the beach has no value, what can a film do? Artists must find a picklock to break the bolts in which certain ideas have been locked. Values ​​have been reversed: in first place is being Italian, in second place being human. And these people in difficulty who arrive are less men as they are not Italians. But the flows cannot be stopped. And we respond with a wall that wants to act as a dam, when the currents that move are oceanic, with very high waves?”.

Is he combative?
«There is no desire for in-depth analysis, to recognize that
someone knows more than you: the slogan is enough, without the need for propaganda. In the theater, I act The periodic system by Primo Levi. An author who in another book, If this is a manbegins by saying something like: as long as man thinks that the foreigner is an enemy, the concentration camp is
behind the corner. Let’s think about it today, when we try to accompany them back to the hell they are escaping from.”

So do you continue with the theatre?
«In the autumn we will be on tour with The periodic system, also in Milan at Franco Parenti and in Rome at Argentina. Then I do it Dracula with Sergio Rubini, a fun show. And I continue to carry my book around.”

The book is called Every memory a flowerand it is a chain of incipits.
«It was born as my writing exercise, I have always written for the theatre, poems, small prose, the film I directed (The Ideal City, ed.). This time I talked about things that happen to me.”

What happens in his life?
«A dream, a newspaper article, my brother who is about to drown in a river in Madagascar… The other’s story becomes mine. In an incipit I relate a woman who lost everything in the fire of her home, comparing it to the people who arrive by dinghy with nothing but themselves.”

What would you save from a fire?
«The computer: everything is there. I don’t have a good memory.”

How does he act?
«or I talk about memory as something that allows you to store and remember. I don’t mean what you learn for the theatre: you then forget that.”

He starred in Better youthwhich chronicled Italy from 1966 to 2003: if there was a sequel, what would we see?
“Another world. Not so much for social media, but for political disappointment. It was believed that being honest was enough to come to power, but this is not the case: you have to go there prepared. Internet democracy? It’s relative: we exclude a huge number of people who don’t have computers and don’t surf. But the most serious thing is resentment. Once speaking in front of others made your legs tremble, today on the Internet there is a sense of impunity even in offenses. However, I am convinced that we can continue a path of commitment, trying to infect others.”

He has just been awarded for Bellocchio’s film, a certainly committed author.
«The traitor it’s my second time with Bellocchio, I had already done it Good morning night. I really liked his extreme choice of wanting me to act in real Palermo, without giving in to the temptation to make it more understandable, without domesticating it: Totuccio Contorno is like that, his language is Palermo, and speaking it even in court allowed him to express his thoughts in the most precise way, to be master of the situation. But even a Sicilian struggles to fully understand it.”

Did you know this dialect?
«Generally the popular Palermo dialect is spoken as a joke, as a quote, or as a joke bad meat. I, however, attended middle school, at Kalsa, where one of my aunts taught and where many of my classmates dropped out, arrived at school accompanied by the police, everyone worked: the baker, the shepherd, the greengrocer. It was the 70s and 80s, when people still didn’t really know what the mafia was. Then there were 150-200 deaths a year on the streets.”