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| Roberto Andò with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I am rehearsing a new play in Naples. It’s a play by Colm Tóibín.” |
Toni Servillo (star of Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty) plays Luigi Pirandello (winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for literature) in Roberto Andò’s enchanted Strangeness (La Stranezza, co-written with Ugo Chiti and Massimo Gaudioso), which is as gracefully far away from a biopic as it gets. The two men the famous author incognito encounters, both undertakers and madly involved in local theatre, are played by the popular Italian comedy team Ficarra e Picone (Salvatore Ficarra as Sebastiano Vella and Valentino Picone as Onofrio Principato).
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| Luigi Pirandello (Toni Servillo) with Sebastiano Vella (Salvatore Ficarra) and Onofrio Principato (Valentino Picone) in Roberto Andò’s Strangeness |
I first met Roberto Andò the morning before Long Live Freedom (Viva La Libertà), starring Toni Servillo, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Valerio Mastandrea was screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Cinecittà’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema in 2014 and again in 2017 for The Confessions (Le Confessioni), co-written by Angelo Pasquini, shot by Maurizio Calvesi, and starring Servillo with an exceptional ensemble cast including Pierfrancesco Favino (Francesca Archibugi’s The Hummingbird) Connie Nielsen, Marie-Josée Croze, Daniel Auteuil, Moritz Bleibtreu, Lambert Wilson, and Johan Heldenbergh meeting in Heiligendamm at the Baltic Sea.
Strangeness takes us on a train ride from a hundred years ago, a female passenger who laughs and our protagonist (Pirandello) who falls asleep only to realise that everyone is gone. Upon arrival in the town of his youth, he finds out that his wet nurse and nanny had just died and he sees that the mouth of the corpse of the mostly silent woman when alive, stays open, as if in defiance, until it is cordoned shut by a kerchief wrapped around her chin. So begins a tale of absurdity in tragedy, a look at the human condition equally benevolent and terrifying.
With the casting of Servillo, Ficarra, and Picone, two mostly separate worlds of entertainment from a hundred years ago meet two separate spheres of the present. The result is fruitful, hilarious, and provoking an openness all too rare these days. Being in part a making of the groundbreaking play “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” Andò also elegantly tackles questions of tradition, superstition, and how we all search for our author sometime.
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| Sebastiano Vella (Salvatore Ficarra) with Luigi Pirandello (Toni Servillo) |
At its heart, it is a film about artistic inspiration and memory, Sicilian customs, life and death, and the strangeness within all of us.
From Naples, Roberto Andò joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Strangeness.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Hi!
Roberto Andò: Hello, Anne-Katrin, how are you!
AKT: I’m fine. You are in the theatre I see!
RA: Yes, because I am rehearsing a new play in Naples.
AKT: Which play?
RA: It’s a play by Colm Tóibín. You know him?
AKT: Yes, of course. I was actually in a scene with him in a movie. Volker Schlöndorff's Return To Montauk, shooting on the steps of the New York Public Library. It’s a variation on Max Frisch and I can be seen in the same shot with Colm Tóibín.
RA: I like him very much. He wrote a new version of Clytemnestra [House Of Names]. It’s very beautiful.
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| Sebastiano Vella (Salvatore Ficarra) and Onofrio Principato (Valentino Picone) in the play |
AKT: And you are in the middle of rehearsals for it?
RA: Yes.
AKT: Great! It’s so nice to see you again! This is our third conversation, plus the beautiful remembrance to Abbas Kiarostami you sent me. With Strangeness, I thought about something you said during our first conversation on Long Live Freedom. You said: “Powerful men often have this stranger inside of themself.” Can you tell me about your thoughts on the title “Strangeness”?
RA: That’s the way in which Pirandello was writing in a letter. He was using this strangeness to speak about the new comedy he was writing, Six Characters. It was a moment when it was not so clear what was to become of this comedy. I think it’s also a very peculiar way to stay in the world of the Sicilian people. It’s a moment in which everything is not clear but in some way there is already a kind of evidence.
And since this movie is about the act of creating the creation, we see Pirandello staying with these ghosts. I was sure it was the right title for this movie, because it’s really concerning a magic moment in which the solitude of the artist is facing a certain context which is leaving and moving. Everything is in the mind, only the mind. And in some way also very very present, very concrete. So for me it was the right title.
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| Colm Tóibín with Volker Schlöndorff on the New York Public Library set for Return To Montauk Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
AKT: It is perfect.
RA: And the phrase that you were remembering was concerning what is strange inside us and at times is becoming present, is revealing itself.
AKT: Cinema itself is very much about ghosts returning in general.
RA: Absolutely.
AKT: The beginning of your film is a train ride - train rides and cinema - there’s another link and connection. The family we encounter has a strangeness, especially with the laughter. I noted that this is also a film confronting ridicule, laughter, and mouths.
RA: Absolutely! I think that Pirandello was not only the author who was discovering the fact that all of us, we are in search of becoming a character. But also he was discovering a special tone that is between tragedy and comic. This is something that is very peculiar to Sicily. Also in my experience, when you are at a funeral in Sicily, in a certain moment everything can turn.
AKT: Into the comical?
RA: The ridiculous or comical! Pirandello defined a special music that is the music of the grotesque. He’s really the writer who used this coupled tone between tragedy and comic. What interested me very much with this idea was also the cast I did for this movie.
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| The play in Strangeness |
AKT: Undertakers and theatre people are the same here! And you cast a famous comedy team opposite Toni Servillo.
RA: Exactly. And this is very important because it’s the heart of this movie. In a way everything was suggested by [Salvatore] Ficarra and [Valentino] Picone, the two actors who are playing the undertakers. They are very popular here in Italy. They are great stars with the audience, but they are known as comedians. For a long time we said that we were going to do something together. This was the chance to do it and I think the combination of Servillo and Ficarra and Picone, the special mood of the movie, of crossing every moment from comedy to tragedy, was very important for the success in Italy. It gave a special quality to this movie.
AKT: Even those of us who are not familiar with the comedy team can sense the difference and that there are two worlds colliding. At the same time, there are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Shakespeare did what you did with this film a long time ago.
RA: Absolutely, it’s true. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, you can say there are many connections with Pirandello. I was a great reader of Pirandello in my life, so it was great fun to manipulate his work and to create a story in which people who know about his work can recognise different themes and also characters.
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| Onofrio Principato (Valentino Picone) with the theatre company |
AKT: Toni Servillo starts to look like Sigmund Freud!
RA: Pirandello and Freud are connected in some way.
AKT: I loved the historical detail about the snacks sold in theatres 100 years ago in Sicily: pistachios, nuts, peanuts, dried chickpeas, and pumpkin seeds!
RA: You have to think that in that period, this kind of theatre in the village, they were a microcosm in which was reflected the life and the death of this village. It was really a way for a community to find something in common. In Sicily the life is individualistic and the only moment in which you can find something that is a sense of community is popular theatre and the religious moment.
AKT: Which are connected clearly.
RA: Which are connected. It’s also the moment in which the audience became a character. This community through the theatre is a way to ask something to the other. Who I am, who we are. I always tell this story about the puppet theatre that was very popular in Sicily till the moment television became so strong. Till about 1950, the puppet theatre was very important, was a kind of paradigm of life. It was only for a male audience. Women were not allowed.
AKT: Really?
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| Salvatore Ficarra, Toni Servillo and Salvatore Ficarra on the Strangeness set |
RA: Yes, it was kind of like Mahabharata in India. Every night there was a step, an episode. It was the Charlemagne epic, the story of Charlemagne, Orlando Furioso. There was a traitor, Gano di Maganza [Ganelon] and sometimes at the end of the episode when Gano di Maganza had done something terrible, some people in the audience stayed there in the theatre because they wanted to have the puppet of the traitor to destroy it.
AKT: I see!
RA: You can understand what is the line between fiction and reality in Sicily. Pirandello was able to capture this.
AKT: In the beginning on the train, he is confronted with his dead, his past, his ghosts. You mentioned this theatre being only for men - the female laughter is very disturbing. A few scenes later, his Nanny who died has her mouth open, again, disrupting what is common for a wake. There is a thread in your film about female agency, about voicing and not-voicing. Can you tell me more about it?
RA: Absolutely! Also, the character in the movie is acted by my daughter Giulia who plays Santina. She is a kind of rebel. She is a female who looks like a slave in the beginning. She works with her brother and the brother is jealous of her and we discover then that she is in love with the other. She’s a kind of rebel. I think it was like this in Sicily, you have the woman in a condition that was, of course, not like today. That was without voice. But in some way all the women we see have character, they have a strong voice in another way.
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| La Stranezza poster |
At the beginning you see this woman laughing and we discover then that she is la Figliastra in the comedy of Pirandello, is a character, is really a ghost. Then we have the nurse of Pirandello, who is dead. Her mouth remains open. Then we have the character of Santina who is a woman we later discover is a rebel, somebody who is going against the rules of the male. I think in that society there was a kind of matriarchy, a way to keep a personality for the women, to keep a strong sense of freedom.
AKT: There is a beautiful line in the film that Pirandello every Sunday morning gave an audience to his characters.
RA: Because Pirandello was of the great writers of the last century the one who was most connected with his characters, was really obsessed by his characters. He was writing a novel in which he’s imagining this kind of meeting every week with his characters. Giving them the chance to say what they want, what are their desires. It’s very interesting.
AKT: I think Henry James writes about how sometimes his characters were taking over and I find it very funny that Pirandello said, hey I give you a date, an appointment, Sunday morning. I limit you - other times, go way!
RA: Yes!
AKT: Another line he says is: “We authors have the ambition to make plausible what is not.” Is that your goal too with your work?
RA: Absolutely! It could be really a line from my work, I think. I say that I’m interested in the 'Romanesque' in cinema. Italian cinema is very known for realism, Neo-realism. But what is interesting for me today is 'Romanesque' [novelistic, fantastic, English doesn’t do the word justice]. This line is a way to explain something that is not away from reality, Romanesque. It is something including a sense of reality that is different. In which we find also this strangeness.
AKT: This strangeness that includes our ghosts. We all live with our ghosts every day, every hour.
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| Cinecittà Studios Chief Nicola Maccanico at Open Roads: New Italian Cinema in New York Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
RA: Absolutely.
AKT: Thank you so much for this!
RA: Thank you, Anne-Katrin! I’m very happy to have seen you! I hope to see you again in person. Unfortunately at the moment I can’t come to New York so it is very nice to see you this way!
AKT: It is! And toi, toi, toi with your play!
RA: Ciao ciao ciao!
Strangeness screens on Sunday, June 4 at 8:00pm and on Thursday, June 8 at 12:30pm - Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center.
Open Roads: New Italian Cinema runs through Thursday, June 8.
