Paolo Taviani (2022)

The film-making partnership of the Taviani brothers, Vittorio and Paolo, lasted more than half a century.  Their final collaboration as directors was Wonderful Boccaccio (2015); they shared the writing credit on A Private Matter (2017) but the failing health of Vittorio, the elder brother, meant that Paolo, for the first time, was named sole director.  Four years after his brother’s death, Paolo Taviani, now in his ninety-first year, has written and directed Leonora Addio.  He wasn’t well enough to travel to England for this screening at the London Film Festival but introduced it with a short video message.  He said the film had been described as ‘a bit experimental, a bit classical’, which he thought ‘the devil of a description’.  Taviani’s phrase is right enough:  Leonora Addio is absorbing but confounding.

The film takes its title from a novel of the same name (‘Leonora, Farewell’) by Luigi Pirandello but it isn’t an adaptation of it, though Taviani is much concerned with the novel’s author.  In terms of screen time, Leonora Addio is mostly the story of what happened, following Pirandello’s death in 1936, to his ashes.  Appended to this is a dramatisation of his short story The Nail (Il chiodo).  For most of its ninety minutes, Leonora Addio comprises black and white film, including, as well as Taviani’s narrative, news footage of the Nobel ceremonies of 1934, where Pirandello received the prize for literature, and various archive glimpses of Italian life in the early post-war years.  There are just two bursts of colour – the golden flames of a cremation oven and the blue of the Mediterranean beyond the Sicilian coast.  The Nail, in contrast, is shot almost entirely in colour, which makes complete sense.

Leonora Addio’s early sequences are narrated by the elderly Pirandello (voiced by Roberto Herlitzka).  His face remains unseen as we watch, from his point of view, his sons and daughter – first as young children then as the adults they were by 1936 – approach what’s about to be their father’s deathbed.  Pirandello had a long, sometimes turbulent relationship with Mussolini’s Fascist Party.  After publicly tearing up his Party membership card in 1927, he remained under secret police surveillance for the rest of his life but nevertheless donated his Nobel Prize medal to be melted as a contribution to Mussolini’s ‘Gold to the Fatherland’ campaign during the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935.  In Leonora Addio a Fascist government minister decrees that Pirandello, as a high-profile supporter of the Party, be given a state funeral, which was just what he didn’t want.  The film’s voiceover quotes from his detailed funeral instructions – the request that his body be transported to a crematorium on ‘a pauper’s cart’ and his ashes then dispersed ‘because I want nothing, not even ashes, to be left of me’.

The cremation happened but the ashes wouldn’t go away.  Pirandello also stipulated that, if they were not immediately dispersed, the ashes should instead be returned to his home town, Agrigento in Sicily, and placed in ‘some rough, stone-walled countryside … where I was born’.  That’s what eventually happened – but not until 1961.  The ashes remained for a decade in a niche within Rome’s Verano Cemetery before the first post-war Italian administration allowed them to be taken to Palermo for a second funeral and interment according to Pirandello’s second-preference wishes.  The sculptor commissioned to construct the urn’s final resting place, on a hillside outside Agrigento, devoted the best part of fifteen years to the project.  The delay, in other words, was comically lengthy and Taviani, in describing the ashes’ journey from Rome under the supervision of a Sicilian local government official (Fabrizio Ferracane) and their protracted stopover in Palermo, repeatedly tries to show the funny side of the matter.

As the aircraft carrying the ashes from Rome to Palermo waits to take off, a rumour starts up that there’s a dead man on the plane.  The superstitious passengers anxiously disembark, leaving only the pilot, the government official and the urn on board.  For the second funeral procession that moves down the streets of Palermo, the urn is lodged in a smaller-than-usual coffin:  a watching child asks his mother if there’s a dwarf inside it.  The mother can’t help laughing and whispers their son’s question to her solemn-looking husband.  He also cracks up – ditto the next person who hears about what the boy said.  This pass-it-on sequence is a rather tiresome means of showing off a succession of amazing camera faces and stressing the irresistible (or that’s the idea) Italian sense of humour.  More effective is the eventual transfer of the ashes from one urn to another, before the final interment, in a Palermo council office.  The second urn is too small to accommodate all the ashes, some of which spill onto the paper covering a desk.  After the officials doing the transfer have left the room with the new urn, another man enters and gathers up the residue from the paper on the desk. After the urn has been deposited in its hillside niche, the same man reappears to disperse the remainder of the ashes into the air, as Pirandello wanted in the first place.

After this comes The Nail.  Bastianeddu (Matteo Pittiruti), twelve or so years old, is a recent immigrant to America from Sicily, with other members of his family.  They’ve made their home in New York and Bastianeddu helps out in the bar in Harlem run by one of his relatives.  Charming when he waits tables and does a little dance number for the customers, the boy has a less likeable habit of getting dogs to walk on their front legs while he keeps hold of the hind legs.  Bastianeddu does this in Sicily (in a flashback shot in black and white) and again in New York, when he comes upon a dog as he’s leaving work one day.  Nearby, on a patch of waste ground, two girls are fighting violently.  One girl (Dora Becker), whose hair is black and dress dark blue, is older than the other; her opponent (Dania Marino), in a red dress and with startlingly vivid orange hair, is more feral.  Her name is Betty.  Bastianeddu sees a large nail on the ground.  He picks up the nail and drives it into Betty’s head, killing her instantly.

Even though the monochrome images of the ashes odyssey are beautifully composed and lit (by Paolo Carnera and Simone Zampagni), they tend to be upstaged by Taviani’s remarkable collection of news film.  And Leonora Addio‘s prevailing wintry atmosphere, reinforced by Nicola Piovani’s elegant, elegiac score, is vividly contradicted by the vehemently sinister New York sequences, with their portraits of brutal children.  The register eventually reverts, though.  Bastianeddu at first tells the police he believes he was meant to spot the nail on the ground precisely in order to do what he did to Betty.  After seeing her corpse in the police morgue, he starts to think again.  His voiceover promises his victim that he’ll never forget her, and he’s as good as his word:  we see the adult Bastianeddu visiting Betty’s grave.  I may have misremembered but I think of this sequence too as in black and white – because it’s tonally more in keeping with the earlier parts of the film.

Otherwise, The Nail simply couldn’t have been enclosed within Taviani’s main narrative without overwhelming it.  Pirandello wrote Il chiodo only just before his death yet the tale shockingly interrupts the persistent impression Leonora Addio gives of being an old man’s film.  Perhaps, though, it also confirms that impression.  Paolo Taviani evidently wanted to dramatise Pirandello’s short story as well as the long story of his ashes.  Although it’s an awkward fit with what’s gone before, the nonagenarian Taviani has good reason to tack The Nail onto Leonora Addio rather than await another opportunity to bring it to the screen.

6 October 2022