(Berlin) For sixty years, the inseparable Taviani brothers made films together. The eldest, Vittorio died in 2018. The youngest, Paolo, 90, found the strength to shoot one last film alone, in competition at the Berlinale.
Posted at 1:57 p.m.
During the preparation of Leonora Addio, for more than two years, Vittorio, to whom the film is dedicated, was no longer physically at his side. But “he was with me,” said Paolo Taviani, patriarch of Italian cinema, in an interview with AFP.
The idea for certain parts of this film-collage, imbued with the idea of death and the traces that the artists leave behind them, moreover germinated in the minds of the two brothers well before Vittorio’s death.
This is the case of the chapter adapting a short story, He Chiodoof the great Italian playwright of the beginning of the XXand century, and Nobel Prize for Literature, Luigi Pirandello, says Paolo Taviani.
Written shortly before the author’s death in 1936, it tells the story of a little Sicilian who must follow his father to New York, retains an intimate wound and ends up in a fit of madness by killing a child.
This adaptation, shot in color, is preceded by Paolo with a black and white fable on the transfer of the ashes of Luigi Pirandello, from Rome to Sicily, fifteen years after his death.
An “absurd journey” according to Paolo, which sets the tone for a “complex film, both sad and not sad”. “I did everything I could to show sad and grotesque situations, as well as love stories,” he adds.
“The tree will grow again”
These stories feature “such narrative richness, they’re beyond reality, it’s a mixture of fact and invention, confusing as life can be during this pandemic,” he continued. .
“Vittorio and I decided to make films when I was 16 and he was 18, seeing Paisa of Rosselini,” he says. “We then understood that films could change lives and reveal to us who we really were”.
“Years later, we won the Palme d’Or for Padre Padrone (1977), handed over to Rosselini, and it was like a circle that was closing,” underlines the man who also won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes (The night of San Lorenzo1982) and the Golden Bear in Berlin (Caesar must die2012), with his brother.
The film is also a tribute from a tutelary figure of Italian cinema in the golden age of neorealism, with on-screen quotations from fictional film clips to evoke the torments of the post-war period. in Italy.
“This golden age of Italian cinema was a bit like the Renaissance, full of extraordinary artists in their heyday, like Visconti, Fellini,” he says.
A glorious period gone? “It’s like a tree that has roots, and those roots are still there even though the wind has picked up and branches have fallen,” he replies. “They are powerful and strong and if young people find money to make films, the tree will grow again”.