Open Roads: New Italian Cinema At Lincoln Center 2023

[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