Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2023

[Chris Knipp]

NICCOLÒ FALSETTI: MARGINS/MARGINI


SLINFATTI, CREATINI AND TURBANTI IN MARGINI

Wailing in the sticks

This is the tale of three young guys in long ago 2008 (Emanuele Linfatti, Edoardo; Matteo Creatini, Iacopo; and Francesco Turbanti, Michele) in a "street punk" band who live in the provincial Italian town of Grossetto. They are definitively on the margins, and what they want to achieve is frustratingly out of reach. Don't we all experience this situation sometimes? Turbanti and Falsetti did actually start a punk band in Grossetto, PEGS, which still exists. They're basically here having fun with their own experience, ramping up the isolation and the boredom.

Their dream is to do something big and their effort to stage a concert featuring a known US band in their hometown, frustrated at every turn, is funny, a little heartbreaking and ultimately heartening. It starts when they get their big chance to open for the band "The Defense" in Bologna and then the whole concert is cancelled. On a whim, they get up their courage and call The Defense and invite them to play in Grossetto. They say yes.

This is when their real trouble begins. The Defense want airfare from Russia to Italy. They have a shopping list of equipment to be supplied for their gig that a local entrepreneur says will cost them 4,000 euros to rent. Then one of the three, who plays classical cello, gets a replacement gig he can't say no to - to play under the baton of Daniel Barenboim - and the rehearsal is scheduled the day of the Grossetto punk concert.

"Miche" in his late twenties is the most passionate and the oldster of the trio, who has a long-suffering wife, Margherita (Silvia D’Amico) and school-age daughter. "Iac" and "Edo" still live at home and get their laundry done for them. They are all in a way grownup children, but above all they are losing themselves in the violent noise of late blooming Italian punk music - and the struggle to get it heard locally - to escape the boredom and very un-Italian ugliness of this town in the Maremma (once swampland) that no tourist ever visits, or Italian either. Its abandoned weed-infested little traffic circle, a visible road to nowhere, is its signature image.

And this is of course a tale of male bonding and togetherness. When Iac is presumably out of the planned big gig - for which they have found neither the venue nor the equipment - he still participates in the desperate but enthusiastic efforts to pull things together. The hilarious climax in that is when they trash a hated disco, the Eden, whilst stealing a mixer they need, because they want to make it look like a burglary, and they get really carried away, smashing everything, setting off the sound system, and spraying each other with a fire extinguisher. It is, in a way, the punk concert of your dreams.

This debut film premiered in in Venice’s Critics' Week and there got favorable nods from Alex Ritman in Hollywood Reporter and Lee Marshell in Screen Daily. Marshall called Margins "a debut that may crowd-surf on good reviews and word-of-mouth well beyond its home market." It has something extra, more affectionate than mocking, more about the young male bonding than the music, but in every moment affectionate and true. The cinematography by Alessandro Veridiani is splendid and the closing credits are briliant and make you want to sing along. A tribute to the passion and togetherness of youth.

Margins/Margini, 93 mins., debuted Sept. 2, 2022 at Venice Critics' Week (Quinlan review of Margins by Raffaele Reale.) It was released in Italy Sept.8. and later shown in several other festivals. Screened for this review in Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (Jun. 1-8, 2023) at Lincoln Center in collaboration with Cinecittà.
Sunday, June 4 at 12:00pm (Q&A with Niccolò Falsetti)

[Chris Knipp]

GIUSEPPE FIORELLO: FIREWORKS/STRANIZZA D'AMURI (2023)


GABRIELE PIZZURRO AND SAMUELE SEGRETO IN FIREWORKS/STRANIZZA D'AMURI

A gay love story, an infamous hate crime, a lasting political impact

Italian TV star Giuseppe ("Beppe") Fiorello has staged an impressive directorial debut with Fireworks/Stranizza d'amuri, a gay coming-of-age romance based on real events. It takes place in an ultra-conservative Sicily of the 1980's and ends with the hate crime that gave birth to Arcigay, Italy’s first and largest LGBTQ rights group. Simply opened in Italy March 23, 2023, with no festival showings, it has received no outside reviews, but apparent acclaim in Italy. An Italian review in Quinlan by Massimiliano Schiavoni points out where the film is accurate and where it isn't - a place to start. A Variety preview lays out details of the film's creation.

Fireworks arouses strong mixed feelings. The coming of age love story is sweet and touching; the general homophobia and resulting atrocity trigger feelings of horror and repulsion. Is one touched, disturbed, uplifted, angered, galvanized? It all may seem too much to deal with at once: the innocent purity of young love, the vile machismo overflowing into hate-crime murder. And to heighten the mood even further the film moves the events from 1980, when they occurred, to the summer of 1982, when Italy was exulting over its world Cup soccer win - and also includes some spectacular up-close-and-noisy fireworks sequences.

Schiavoni says Italy has forgotten this event because it wrongly thinks it has moved on and thus it was essential to retell the story as this film does: Italy is an externally beautiful country, he writes, but has't achieved a matching beauty on the inside.

Fiorello recalls the tragic affair of the young homosexual couple Giorgio Giammona and Antonio Galatola, later remembered as Giorgio and Toni, who were shot dead in Giarre in 1980, according to the grim pattern of a murder with a clearly homophobic matrix. Having discarded the initial hypothesis of a murder/suicide triggered by the desperation of the two boys, the crime went unpunished, since the only serious suspect (and horror was added to horror) was Toni's nephew, barely 13 years old, who was not prosecutable for his age and who in any case recanted his version of events several times.

There are other complications, but the cloudy events, the fake suicide and lack of prosecution for any crime protected by traditional Sicilian omertà, are clarified in the strong reaction: in Palermo within a month the first Arcigay homosexual activist group was formed, and this was to be the foremost gay activist organization in he country. Also a lesbian group reportedly was formed.

"The crime in Giarre" - shooting the two boys in the head while hand in hand - led to the novel Stranizza by Valerio la Martire, to which this film owes a debt. But the actual Sicilian dialect title "Stranizza d'amuri" (Miracle of Love) refers to a famous song by Franco Battiato, a Giarre local, but composed in 1979 and referring to WWII but adolelscent love. It's a very famous song, and Battiato's only one in his native Sicilian dialect. The reference indicates Fiorello's desire to make his film a universal portrait of adolescence and adolescent love that "penetrates the bones" of its youthful first-timers.

Fiorello paints with a very broad brush in this film. Many adult characters are more seen than developed. It uses intense closeups, the swarthy, bearded faces of the adult men, the smooth, fresh faces of the two boys who are at the center of the story - so very, very different from François Ozon's recent, also tragic, but not quite serious, Summer of 85., which comes to mind because both teen gay romances feature romantic motorbike scenes.

Samuele Segreto is Gianni, the older, 17-year-old boy, already called mockingly "Giannuccia" and marked as a "faggot" for past behavior which may have caused him to spend time in a reformatory. He has a mean stepfather (and is probably illegitimate) and a frightened mother and his status in the tiny town is uneasy. Segreto is short, dark, and pretty with a bright and ready smile. He has some of the looks of the young Belmondo.

But smile or not, Gianni's circumstances are uneasy, so when by chance while delivering a motorbike he literally runs into Nino (Gabriele Pizzurro), Nino's unscathed reputation and relatively serene home life becomes a bridge to escape for Gianni - for a time - as well as to love. Nino assists his father, whose livelihood comes from staging fireworks displays for local fairs - an opportunity for the film to provide us with gorgeous and noisy screen-filling displays, which, if you give yourself to the style, seem not intrusive but integral: they express this world's explosive emotionality, as the rabbit-shooting scenes featuring Nino's semi-comic little bro Totò (Simone Raffaele Cordiano), express its inherent violence. Pizzurro is tall and thin with light skin and big fluffy hair. Nino loves to go off and strip down to his underpants and swim in the local river. Eventually he gets Gianni to join him.

Fiorello cunningly manipulates the World Cup not only to create climactic tension but to show Gianni and Nino's social exclusion because of their sexuality: when everybody is celebrating Italy's victory, at the ultimate moment of national brotherhood, they aren't watching but instead use the attraction of everyone's attention to go off by themselves once more. They have been forced to separate when too often they have been seen kissing. And while there is nothing like the spit-lubed butt-fucking of Brokeback Mountain, it's made pretty clear that the kissing has led to making love

I have to admit after seeing the film, and very close to the screen at the Walter Reade Theater where the visual and auditory impact was tremendous - that, though the film is a bit overlong and moves too slowly in its early reels - somehow Fiorello manages to make us feel above all else the pure adolescent feeling of the boys and the beauty of their love, despite the grim finale. It's an impactful film and one that ought to be seen outside local territories and specialized Italian cinema festivals. One wonders why it had no festival screenings to launch it for a broader audience - whether it was submitted only to Italian festivals, and rejected out of lingering unease.

Fireworks/Stranizza d'amuri, 172 mins., released theatrically in Italy with no festival exposure March 23, 2023. Screened for this review as part of the June 1-8, 2023 Film at Lincoln Center-Cinecittà series Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.
Thursday, June 1 at 3:30pm (Q&A with Giuseppe Fiorello, Gabriele Pizurro, Samuele Segreto)
Tuesday, June 6 at 6:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

DAVIDE GENTILE: MY SUMMER WITH THE SHARK/DENTI DA SQUALO (2023)


TIZIANO MENICHELLI (RIGHT) CONFRONTS "TECHNO" IN MY SUMMER WITH THE SHARK/DENTI DI SQUALO

Adventurous summer

My Summer with the Shark/Dentida squalo, the new film premiered at Lincoln Center, conveys a sense of play, adventure, and courage that is infectious. It isn't always clear what may be happening to young Walter (Tiziano Manichelli), the feisty, small-for-his age 13-year-old all this is about. But his ballsy confidence and his surprising skillset (skateboarding, shark wrangling, dancing, standing up to anybody) are always in evidence. Something may have gone a bit astray in the ten-year-old screenplay and its later revisions. But first-time director Davide Gentile did something right, because the spirit of play and adventure is there.

Walter discovers a secret world for himself in the summer while his mother (Virginia Raffaele) is working in an outdoor restaurant somewhere around Rome-Ostia. Her husband, Walter's father (Claudio Santamaria) has recently died at only forty in an accident in an air purifier saving someone, or so we hear: no one particularly likes telling the truth in this movie. Rita's refers to Antonio only by talking to Walter about getting rid of his stuff. Dealing with grief and helping Walter do so aren't things Rita is particularly up for. For Walter, Antonio is still very much present, in the film's magic realist moments when he appears to provide crucial life lessons and advice.

Riding his bike on the coast near Rome Walter comes across a magnificent, seemingly abandoned estate with a tower and a large leaf-infested swimming pool. Walter strips down and jumps in. He's an excellent swimmer. The big shark that appears and starts swimming toward Walter is the first menace Walter narrowly escapes. But soon comes another one, Carlo, aka Elo aka Giancarlo, an aggressive, bigger boy who says he's the "custodian" of the property. But then appears a bigger, bearded adult who calls himself "Il Corsaro," the Pirate (Edoardo Pesce ofDogman), who later appears to have had some connection with Walter's father.

Walter becomes more a partner than a sidekick to Carlo, and he stands up effectively to The Corsair. Carlo brings Walter to Techno, recommending his sills to this mysterious miscreant who's always playing a little squeaky video game. Techno gives Walter an errand to run and he successfully completes it, his smallness and seeming insignificance providing camouflage. What is he carrying? Anyway, piles of money accrue. Rita's anger when she discovers them lead to the revelation that the boy's dead father was also involved in illegality she wants her son to avoid. That seems unlikely. But where Walter is involved, feats of boyish sprezzatura happen and fun is always to be had.

My Summer with the Shark/Denti da squalo, 104mins. Announced world premiere at Open Road: New Italian Cinema from FLC and Cinecittà Jun. 3, 2023.
Saturday, June 3 at 8:30pm (Q&A with Davide Gentile)


EDOARDO PESCE, TIZIANO MENICHELLI IN MY SUMMER WITH THE SHARK/DENTI DI SQUALO

[Chris Knipp]

MONICA DUGO: LIKE TURTLES/COME LE TARTARUGHE (2022)


MONICA DUGO, RIGHT, IN LIKE TURTLES/COME LE TARTARUGHE

Hiding a while when things get tough

Like Turtles/Come le tartarughe, the experienced actress Monica Dugo's directorial and writing debut feature, concerns a well off bourgeois housewife's extreme reaction when her husband leaves her, and their two children, and the Filipina housekeeper, and their palatial apartment in the center of Rome, to take a break, or find himself. Tina (Dugo) takes up residence in her husband's space in the family's equally spacious custom-built family armadio, their wardrobe, which he has made available by removing his clothing. She remains in touch, with the door often open, but not quite involved normally in everyday family life. She promises to come out when her husband returns.

The style of this film has been called "elegant," and it precedes with thorough smoothness and confidence. It may seem unduly whimsical and fanciful to deal with withdrawal and depression in this way. However, frivolity and fantasy are features of some of Italy's greatest contemporary artists - of Fellini, for instance, and Italo Calvino, whose Barone rampante describes a 19th-cenury nobleman who climbs up and lives the rest of his life in a tree.

"I've dealt with hikikomori cases before," says Dr. Fabrizia Storzo, the psychotherapist, whom Lisa (director/lead acdtor Monica Dugo)'s grumpy tennis-playing teenage daughter Sveva (a forceful Romana Maggiore Vergano) brings to the apartment to See her after she's moved into his space in the giant family armadio(wardrobe) after her wishy-washy husband Daniele (Angelo Libri) removes his clothes and walks out. He does so, he explains to Sveva (he is still somehow in the area, and in touch) to find himself, to take a break, and not because of displeasure with Lisa but just because he's "depressed." Other characters include Sveva's poorly treated boyfriend Luca (Francesco Gheghi), rumpled-haired little brother Paolo (Edoardo Boschetti) and the Filipina housekeeper, who quits; an unseen mother-in-law who tends to call with her complaints at dinnertime. Daniele is apparently a coroner, a surgeon, as he tells seven-year-old Paolo, whose patients are in no danger of dying under the knife. For some reason he is already frequently away, and he may have lost interest in Lisa for some Time.

Lisa is pale and petulant but seems more cheerful once ensconced in the wardrobe. Her main function has been to maintain the smooth functioning of the family. She can only exert her power by disrupting it. When Dr. Storzo takes off her shoes and gets into the wardrobe to consult, Lisa launches into an angry and quite inappropriate lecture on how psychotherapy is a hoax and therapists mere money-grubbing quacks. She says they "authorize the selfishness and narcissism" of the "rich bourgeoisie" who "hide behind depression." But she expresses (to Paola) the truism "Hating is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die." Her mother visits her, and offers wisdom too. Her husband probably is with another, older woman from work, with greasy hair and pockmarked face, spied by Sveva.

Glenn Kenny commented favorably on Like Turtles from Venice on RogerEbert.com saying that its commercial prospects are helped by it's being "Ferrante-adjacent," since its story relates to Elena's Days of Abandonment though less "raw and violent."

The device of the wardrobe - which can be removed after it has performed its function and Lisa has reemerged facing the new situation - is a neat one around which the screenplay neatly revolves. However the film winds up being rather fangless, as if it itself has withdrawn from the uneasy topics it caresses. (Perhaps that's what "elegant" means.) Dugo has delivered very watchable film. The images of dp Gianni Mammolotti gently remind us always that this is indeed happening in the centro storico of Rome.

Monica Dugo's directorial debut was made possible through the Venice Biennale College Cinema initiative. (A full cast list is not provided so some characters may be linked with the wrong actors.)

Like Turtles/Come le tartarughe B, 80 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 2, 2022, also playing at Rio in Oct. Screened for this review as part of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema June 1-8, 2023 series at Lincoln Center (with Cinnecittà).
Sunday, June 4 at 5:30pm (Q&A with Monica Dugo)

[Chris Knipp]

ROBERTO ANDÒ: STRANGENESS/LA STRANEZZA (2022)


TONI SERVILLO (LEFT) WITH SALVO FICARRA AND VALENTINO PICONE IN STRANGENESS/LA STRANEZZA

The audience is the play

The great Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), after a long absence, revisits his native Sicily in 1920 for the burial of his wet nurse and the 80th birthday of his mentor novelist-playwright Giovanni Verga while experiencing a creative block and encounters an ambitious company of amateur actors who inspire his most famous work in this gentle fantasy from Roberto Andò.

It is the rather arch conceit of Andò and cowriters Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudioso that the thespian troupe's leaders are a moonlighting duo of gravediggers, Onofrio and Bastiano (comedy duo Salvo Ficarra and Valentino Picone), whose double role makes them links from burial to local theater, while the visiting author does his best to hide his illustrious identity while spying on the lively theatrical efforts. The duo wind up being an inspired choice, and the many scenes of the thespians on stage and off provide an energy that contrasts with the stillness of Servillo as the spiritually dry playwright observing them.

Upon arriving in the city of Agrigento, spying on the spirited amateur thespians, the playwright is captivated by a sui generis Sicilian world of oddball local personalities, ghostly visions, haunting memories and melancholy apparitions that eventually combine to inspire him to write Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore), the play that made him internationally famous.

After a slow start, other than some colorful scenes involving Ficarra and Picone and the acting troupe, things heat up with a full-dress play with Pirandello, outed now, by invitation in a box watching. Non-Sicilian and non-Italian watchers will lose out because there is plenty of dialect and word play.

The film also alludes to the madness of Pirandello's wife and his own inner psychological sufferings, to which he referred by the term "la stranezza" (the strangeness); these also play into the creative ferment and rebirth the change of scene arouses. Servillo remains, as always, impeccably elegant and buttoned-down: with his pointed white beard he looks a lot like the historical Piirandello, lacking only a certain twinkle and sharpness. It's not easy to be a genius, or to play one.

Strangeness has been well received in Italy, and Andò has stressed in interviews that this is a story in which the audience is of primary importance, as it is clearly in the amateur theater events that we observe. It is that active engagement with the audience and with the amateur thespians' lively improvisational methods that inspire Pirandello's masterpiece, whose tumultuous first performance is recreated here as the intense, thought-provoking climax.

The film is dedicated to the memory great contemporary Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), whom Andò has acknowledged as a personal influence.

I have previously reviewed three other Roberto Andò films, Secret Journey(2006) and Long Live Freedom (2013) and The Confessions (2016; the latter two also with Servillo), at Open Roads 20o7 and 2014, respectively, and Mill Vally.) This is more entertaining and colorful of the lot.

Strangeness/Stranezza, 104 mins., debuted at Rome Oct. 20, 2022, opening theatrically in Italy Oct. 27. It also has showed in a number of other festivals and Italian-film series. It was screened for this review as part of the June 1-8, 2023 iteration of the joint Cinecittà-Film at Lincoln Center series Open Roads: New Italian Cinema. Showing:
Sunday, June 4 at 8:00pm
Thursday, June 8 at 12:30pm

[Chris Knipp]

GIANNI AMELIO: LORD OF THE ANTS/IL SIGNORE DELLE FORMICHE (2022)



LUIGI LO CASCIO AND LEONARDO MALTESE IN LORD OF THE ANTS

Lives destroyed by homophobia in Sixties Italy

This complex and interesting though clearly flawed film recreates an important but largely forgotten court case of Italy in the 1960's that delineates the country's uneasy relationship with homosexuality. It features the prolific Luigi Lo Cascio as the accused Aldo Braibanti, an intellectual who at the end of the 1960s was convicted of the crime of "plagio" or grooming of Ettore Tagliaferri, a young man who frequented the Tower, Braibanti's cultural center. As Ettore, there is a stunning performance by newcomer Leonardo Maltese. Counterpoint is provided by an easygoing performance as Unità reporter Ennio Scribani, who covers the case, by Elio Germano.

Lo Cascio, Montese and Germano are compelling and this is a moving, disturbing film. However, as I have learned from Italian sources, notably Raffaele Meale in Quinlan, there are inexplicable alterations and things left out in Gianni Amelio's telling of events. Amelio's freedom with the context of the case - the communist paper's coverage and the support of Braibanti by prominent artists and intellectuals - is hard to understand and creates reservations about the film. So does its style and mood, which is languid and feels rooted in the very backwardness of earlier decades. This film is not quite up to the level of great Amelio work like Così ridevano, Lamerica, and Le chiavi di casa.

But the essential point is clear. Modern Italy, right in the time of worldwide civil rights revolts, was still mired in the fascist aftereffects (Mussolini did not even allow the word "homosexual" to be used because he would not admit there were such people in Italy) and the oppressive "morality" of the Catholic church. Indeed the concept of mentally subjugating another person, designated by the "plagio" law only evoked then and never again, was not just a backward idea but a positively medieval, as well as fascist one, and this was the summer of 1968.

The irate bourgeois mother and the more conservative older brother feel like familiar figures from Italian cinema of decades past. Lord of the Ants sometimes gets mired in its old fashioned, clunky beats. Even though we see young demonstrators on the street supporting Braibanti, the conventionality of Lord of the Ants seems little to acknowledge them, to take too seriously the archaic, repressive viewpoints expressed in the trial.

On the other hand, Braibanti is a complex and remarkable figure here, a playwright, poet but perhaps in his heart of hearts a scientist, specifically a myrmecologist, or ant expert, whose Tower was a community of young people gathered around him and drawn in by his energy and almost renaissance multiple accomplishments. He inspires them. But he also does seem to manipulate them and want to gather a cult around himself. He yells at his young charges. He isn't a pleasant or likable man at all. But Ettore isn't a minor and he both loves and is inspired by Braibanti. We see a love here, a sexual one, between a young and a middle-aged man: and this is a bold element for any Italian film however conventional the rest of it is.

The events that play out lead to the destruction of both men. Ettore's mother imprisons him in a program to "cure" him of his homosexuality that includes a horrible series of electroshock treatments. Ettore becomes a ghost of his former self. And yet he never loses his love and admiration for Braibanti and still says is the most important person in his life and now knows that his family are now his enemies. Aldo and Ettore have one final rather distant but friendly meeting.

As played by Elio Germano, Ennio Scribani, the correspondent for the Rome communist paper Unità assigned to the "plagio" court case that leads Braibanti to be sentenced to nine years imprisonment (though it is reduced) has a double function in the film. He is an easygoing, good humored, perpetually hat-wearing and tieless fellow un-hampered by Catholicism or conservative morality. Thus he provides a balance to the overwrought views of everybody else. (This somewhat simplistic depiction contrasts with Germano's complex and vulnerable portrayal of Giacomo Leopardi in the 2014 Mario Martone biopic also shown in this year's Open Roads Italian film series.) Scribani's presence also enables Amelio to get in a dig at the communist newspaper, whose editor the film represents as a creep without liberal ideas who, somewhat late in the game, expresses regret at having assigned Scribani to the trial and encourages him to resign from the paper, which he does. But while in the film Scribani isn't allowed to use the word "homosexual" or even "communist" in his articles, which are sometimes trashed or replaced by the obnoxious editor, the Quinlin article points out this isn't true.

Despite its flaws Lord of the Ants is still an impressive depiction of this important case. The screenplay keeps the complexity of the issues, especially the fact that Braibanti, though wrongly accused, is a hard man to like and also the fact that young Ettore is rather confused. The film is shines in the performances of Lo Cascio as the forceful but unappealing Braibanti and Germano as the smiling, independent-minded journalist Scribani. The revelation is Leonardo Maltese who as Ettore Tagliaferri, the young gay man destroyed by his own family, is like an open wound, an immensely appealing actor we are likely to see again.

Lord of the Ants/Il signore delle formiche, 134 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 6, 2022 and opened in Italy Sept. 8. It also showed at Busan, Rio, Chicago, and five other international festivals. Screened for this review as part of the June 1-8, 2023 Film at Lincoln Center-Cinecittà series Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.
Monday, June 5 at 6:00pm
Wednesday, June 7 at 3:00pm

[Chris Knipp]

MARIO MARTONE: LEOPARDI/LEOPARDI: IL GIOVANE FAVOLOSO (2014)


ELIO GERMANO IN LEOPARDI

Giacomo Leopardi's life of suffering and creation

This gorgeous, full-dress historical film recreates the troubled and remarkable life of the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century as well as one of Italy's greatest philologists, essayists, and philosophers, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), eldest son of a count in Recanati, in le Marche. Leopardi was presented in the 2023 Italian series at Lincoln Center as part of a tribute to the director Mario Martone. Central to the film's success is the sympathetic performance of Elio Germano as Leopardi. It's an engaging story; but as happens with biopics of great men, there's a struggle to maintain balance between the achievements and the personal drama, and the personal drama decisively wins out.

This is because Leopardi suffered from extraordinary physical problems that progressively bent him over and made his short life wracked with pain. It is a remarkable and demanding physical performance by Germano, who is seen as Leopardi struggling more and more to walk and becoming bent over. The great poet and thinker is never forgotten by the film, but the viewer, especially the one not trained in Italian literature, comes away with a memory dominated by the broken body more than the wonderful verses and brilliant mind.

The childhood (when Giacomo is played by Filippo Chierici) is happy. We see him running and playing with his brother Carlo Orazio and sister Paolina. His brilliance is clear and he's put to work studying with priests but learns mostly, irregularly, plunging into the magnificent library assembled by his father, the grand and conservative Count Monaldo Leopoardi (Massimo Popolizio). We see displays of his knowledge, sight-reading Homer in Greek, and from Hebrew. We also may realize this isn't a balanced education but one steeped in language and philology. But he also reads philosophy, and refers to Nietzsche. And then we hear some of his poetry, which of course sounds poetic if experienced through movie subtitles, but for a true appreciation of which one must understand Italian.

The Italian subtitle "Il giovane favoloso," despite the richness of the mise-en-scène, is more wish than reality, because it is impossible to experience the full fabulousness of a life of such remarkable achievement. And while Giacomo angrily tells judges who deny him a prize who complain of his pessimism that it has nothing to do with his constant, increasing physical ill health, and we hear from him that he has dozens of projects, too many to complete, we see more of his love of Fanny (Anna Mouglalis), who is inevitably more interested in his best friend Ranieri (Michele Riondino), and this turns into a bromance when Ranieri leaves with Leopardi and takes care of him, which takes over the film's last half and is its most memorable and moving focus.

It is a physical feat for Germano, then in his mid-thirties, to look both older and later prematurely aging, and to go through all the contortions of Leopardi's disease of the neck and spine. It is speculated that he had either Pott's disease or ankylosing spondylitis, both deformations of the spine.

The childhood (when Giacomo is played by Filippo Chierici) is happy. We see him running and playing with Carlo Orazio and sister Paolina. His brilliance is clear and he's put to work studying with priests but learns mostly, irregularly, plunging into the magnificent library assembled by his father, the grand and conservative Count Monaldo Leopoardi(Massimo Popolizio) We see displays of his knowledge, sight-reading Homer in Greek, and from Hebrew. We also may realize this isn't a balanced education but one steeped in language and philology; but he also read philosophy, and refers to Nietzsche. And then we hear some of his poetry, which of course sounds poetic if experienced through movie subtitles, but for a true appreciation of which one must understand Italian.

An important early event is the visit from older admirer the classicist Pietro Giordani (Valerio Valasco) - a first recognition of his growing fame and reputation and a challenge to the power of his domineering father. But other memorable scenes indicate that during his lifetime Leopardi was misunderstood or undervalued and it was likely in years following his short life that his extraordinary achievement and importance as a poet became recognized.

The Italian subtitle "Il giovane favoloso," despite the richness of the mise-en-scène, is more wish than reality, because it is impossible to experience the full fabulousness of a life of such remarkable achievement. And while Giacomo angrily tells judges who deny him a prize who complain of his pessimism that it has nothing to do with his constant, increasing physical ill health, we hear from him that he has dozens of projects, too many to complete, we see more of his love of Fanny (Anna Mouglalis), who is inevitably more interested in his best friend Ranieri (Michele Riondino), and this turns into a bromance when Ranieri leaves with Leopardi and takes care of him.

Of course the problem with a writer biopic is that the audience can't spend much time watching the man at a desk with pen writing though that be the most important time in the man's short life. What we would prefer to see is Leopardi in front of a big window looking at the full moon and spouting verses he makes up about it. (This is one of the most beautiful images of a movie full of them.)

Leopardi was robbed of the great love a romanic poet was due, but his life is nonetheless a quintessential nineteenth-century artist's story, running from aristocratic origins to an impoverished early sickly death (he may even have had tuberculosis). And in place of love he had the passionate friendship of his great friend Ranieri. Early on he dreamed of escape - which his father did not want him to do - but eventually broke away with Ranieri and became "the toast of Florence." Later he and Ranieri move to Naples. There is a sequence suggesting (as Wikipedia does) that Leopardi's closeness to Fanny's younger brother reflected he may have been gay. The "more than twenty-five sentimental female friendships" Leopardi had in his lifetime (also indicated in Wikipedia), Martone doesn't describe in this vivid and impressionistic portrait.

More memorable sequences than any of the ones sitting at desks dipping quill pens into glass inkwells are those of a cholera epidemic in Naples when Leopardi dodges two men carrying a dead body along a cobblestone street, tall, thin, black-garbed figures coming to collect the dead from houses, and later, when Ranieri has arranged for the still-virgin Leopardi to visit a brothel and this becomes a hellish escape through fire-lit subterranean passages when he is mocked as "toady" and forced to run away. Martone pulls out all the stops in all these scenes: they are marvelously realized, though they are objective correlatives, one knows, for other things that can only be experienced in reading a book, for this is a man whose greatness is best experienced on the page, not the screen. But it is still good to have this film, even if it is a little overblown, to bring to life a great poet many have read, or to inspire others to read him for the first time.

Leopardi/Leopardi: il giovane favoloso,143 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2014. It was screened for this review at the June 1-8, 2023 Cinecittà-Film at Lincoln Center series Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.