Michael Radford (1994)
Between 1949 and 1952 the poet and communist politician Pablo Neruda lived in exile from his native Chile. His several ports of call during that time, most of them in Europe, included Capri, where Neruda stayed in a villa owned by Italian historian Edwin Cerio. In 1985 the Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta published a novel (its Spanish title translates as Ardent Patience): set in the Isla Negra area of Chile, this invents a friendship between Neruda and his postman, a local teenage boy. The novel begins in 1969 and ends around the time of Neruda’s death four years later. Michael Radford’s Il Postino (‘The Postman’) – an international hit, best known even in America by its Italian rather than its English title – is a peculiar conflation of Neruda’s actual period of exile and Skármeta’s fiction. The action takes place on the island of Procida, off the coast of Naples, in the early 1950s. The postman is now a lost-soul forty-year-old, Mario Ruoppolo (Massimo Troisi), whose relationship with Neruda (Philippe Noiret) brings out Mario’s poetic sensibility, strengthens his romantic nerve and sharpens his political awareness. The fusion of the first and last of these has tragic consequences. Neruda returns to Chile but, several years later, pays a return visit to Procida. He learns from Mario’s wife Beatrice (Maria Grazia Cucinotta) that her husband wrote a poem which he was invited to recite at a communist rally in Naples. The police broke up the rally violently and Mario was killed in the mayhem, shortly before the birth of his and Beatrice’s son, named Pablito in honour of Neruda.
I’d seen this much-loved tragicomedy once before, twenty-odd years ago, and recalled not liking it much. I couldn’t remember why, though, and the storyline is interesting enough: it seemed time for a second viewing. The two main actors make Il Postino well worth watching; otherwise, my estimation of it hasn’t changed with the years, though one reason for that reflects a trend that has developed since I last saw the film. Celebrity-fronted travelogues in Italy are now a television epidemic. Italy Unpacked, which teamed up the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon and the chef Giorgio Locatelli, aired just ten years ago; it sticks in the mind not because it was great but because in 2013 it was still reasonably distinctive. After two series of Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy last year, 2023 has already seen Anton and Giovanni’s Adventures in Sicily and Clive Myrie’s Italian Road Trip (and probably more that I’ve either forgotten or never noticed). Although Michael Radford obviously can’t be blamed for this, I struggled to get TV-travelogue fatigue out of my head as I watched his film – especially because Radford seems to revel in the landscape, the language and the natives as if in anticipation of shows like the ones just mentioned. It’s something of a consolation that at least Il Postino doesn’t drool over the local cuisine, too.
This Italo-idealisation comes through loud and clear in Luis Enríque Bacalov’s (Oscar-winning) score, whose plaintive melody feels like pastiche Ennio Morricone (the latter’s score for Cinema Paradiso (1988) in particular). It comes through also in a supporting cast full of what-a-character characters: Beatrice’s innkeeper mother (Linda Moretti), a lachrymose battleaxe; the ardent communist telegrapher (Renato Scarpo), Mario’s boss at the post office; the priest (Carlo Di Maio) who vetoes Mario’s choice of atheist Neruda as his best man, only to capitulate when he sees the poet at (pretend) prayer in a church pew. Even the people you’re meant not to like, such as a smoothly insincere, right-of-centre local politician (Mariano Rigillo), are rendered innocuous by Radford’s isn’t-this-delightful treatment of the material. Mario, though literate, has had only a rudimentary education. When he first gets into conversation with Neruda, the great poet has to explain what a metaphor is. This paves the way for many jokey, increasingly tiresome references to metaphors (one of which is actually a simile, though Neruda doesn’t seem to notice). The roguish eroticism of a silent courtship scene between Mario and Beatrice proves the film can be just as tedious when it isn’t talking. The beautiful Beatrice – named, of course, to allow a Dante conversation or two between Neruda and the postman – plays solo table football. Mario watches, mesmerised by her attitude and, as she bends towards the table, her cleavage. The display culminates in Beatrice putting the mini-football in her mouth – provocative, like.
Il Postino’s reworking and relocation of Skármeta’s story are sometimes clumsy. On one of his early bike rides up to Neruda’s residence in the hills above Procida, Mario delivers a letter from the Nobel Prize committee. It seems to inform Neruda that he’s been nominated or short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature (I didn’t know the committee formally notified hopefuls in this way). The letter is evidently important to Neruda but he tells Mario he doesn’t think he’ll win the Nobel. During Mario and Beatrice’s wedding reception Neruda receives an urgent telegram: because of the earlier scene, you expect this to be glad tidings from Stockholm; the wire in fact tells Neruda it’s now safe to come back to Chile. The timeframe of Skármeta’s novel means that Neruda does indeed win the Nobel Prize in the course of the story (in 1971). Mentioning it at all in Il Postino, set twenty years earlier, seems pointless. Soon after the wedding, Neruda and his wife, Matilde (Anna Bonaiuto), return to Chile. Mario is uncomplaining but disappointed that Neruda doesn’t, as he assures Mario he will, stay in touch. Beatrice and her mother are more volubly annoyed but neither breathes a word when Neruda and Matilde eventually arrive back in Procida. And there’s no motive for this return visit. It’s just a mechanism for telling the audience what happened to Mario – and for Beatrice belatedly to hand over to ‘Don Pablo’ the medley of sounds of the island which Mario recorded for him, including the beating heart of their unborn child.
Michael Radford, now in his mid-seventies, hasn’t been a prolific director but was quite a high-profile one in the 1980s and 1990s. According to Wikipedia, it was through Another Time, Another Place (1983), Radford’s first dramatic feature (and the only other film of his I’ve seen), that he got involved in bringing Ardent Patience to the screen. After seeing Another Time, Another Place, Massimo Troisi, who had bought the film rights to Skármeta’s novel, wrote a treatment which he sent to Radford. The two men then worked together on developing the script for Il Postino (along with the father-and-son team of Furio and Giacomo Scarpelli). Troisi was, as well as a popular actor and comic performer in Italy, himself the director of three film comedies by the mid-1980s. He intended to co-direct Il Postino with Radford (in the Italian release version – but only that version – the pair share the directing credit). It seems fair to regard Troisi as the prime mover of the project and he’s certainly the film’s chief asset. Although the voice delivering Neruda’s Italian dialogue is obviously dubbed (the voice belongs to Bruno Alessandro), Philippe Noiret is unsurprisingly expert – particularly in his early scenes, when Neruda makes wordlessly clear he has better things to do than pay attention to his postman, who appears to be loitering without intent. But this is, in more ways than one, Massimo Troisi’s picture. He delivers a skilful, graceful (Oscar-nominated) performance. Through his physical presence and one’s foreknowledge of the circumstances in which he made Il Postino, he also brings it real poignancy.
Troisi suffered from rheumatic fever as a teenager and heart problems throughout his adult life. By the time the Il Postino shoot began in early 1994, he was very ill – ‘so weak’, says Wikipedia, ‘that it was only possible for him to work for about an hour each day. Most of his scenes were shot in one or two takes. A shooting schedule was designed to allow the film to be shot around him. This was aided greatly by the fact his stand-in bore such a striking resemblance to Troisi. [The stand-in] was used for all back to camera, long/medium shots and most of the bicycle riding sequences’. Troisi ‘recorded all of his dialogue early in the production, in case he died before filming could be completed’. In the event, he died, at the age of forty-one, less than twenty-four hours after principal photography ended. Troisi’s international breakthrough as an actor was posthumous. For Italian viewers familiar with his other screen appearances, watching him in Il Postino may not be shadowed in the way it’s bound to be for those of us who don’t know him in any role other than his last.
Mario Ruoppolo comes from a family of fishermen. The film’s opening scene sees him out on a boat with others in the early morning. In the next scene, he’s complaining to his father (uncredited) that the fishing trip has given him a cold. As the father determinedly concentrates on his breakfast, Mario continues to lament his lot: he wistfully describes a postcard received from two family members who have recently emigrated to New York. He witters on so much that his father eventually loses patience and breaks his silence. Reminding his son he’s never been any good at fishing, he tells Mario to follow his kin to America if he wants to or, if he doesn’t, to get himself a job without further ado. That’s how Mario’s journey to the post office and Neruda begins. If other sequences were as well shaped and natural as this one, Il Postino would be a stronger film. But Massimo Troisi, despite the exasperating cuteness of the piece, dignifies every scene he’s in. His physical fragility and the delicacy of his characterisation are hard to disentwine but you’re left in no doubt you’ve been watching a very gifted romantic comedian.
16 July 2023
