30/10/2017 - After premiering at Toronto, Paolo Taviani presents his new film, Rainbow – A Private Affair, at the 12th Rome Film Fest, written with his brother Vittorio, but directed by himself

(© Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images/Festa del Cinema di Roma)

Love, jealousy and obsession are at the heart of Rainbow - A Private Affair [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paolo Taviani
film profile], the new film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, inspired by the novel of the same name by Beppe Fenoglio. The film was screened in official selection at the 12^th Rome Film Fest after its world premiere at Toronto Film Festival, and is due to be released in Italian cinemas on 1 November. A film in which war and resistance provide the backdrop to the personal drama of the protagonist, played by Luca Marinelli. Paolo Taviani, who directed the film by himself for the first time, is in Rome to talk about the film.

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Cineuropa: What led you to adapt Fenoglio’s less "epic" novel, which focuses on a personal love story?
Paolo Taviani: We’ve always loved Fenoglio, we consider him the greatest Italian writer of the post-war period. But we’ve quite never managed to make a film from one of his books because we’ve always been too late to the party and the rights are always snatched up. After some time, we gave up. But then two years ago, I heard a reading of "A Private Affair” on the radio. Excited, I called the actor who had performed the reading, thanking him for having rediscovered this masterpiece. Surprisingly, he told me that he had received a call from my brother Vittorio three minutes before, who had told him the exact same thing! At that point it became obvious to us what our next film would be, and we threw ourselves in headlong to this extraordinary book.

What can the story tell a contemporary audience?
It's a familiar situation, a love triangle: him, her and the other man. It's an old story, from Greek tragedy. But the author needs to modernise the themes and bring them to life with modern-day feelings. It's a story that the audience can appreciate, because anyone can fall head over heels for someone, go crazy with love and jealousy, and forget about everything else, as does our protagonist, who forgets that he's with the Resistance in the mountains. He doesn't shun the fight per se, he just simply forgets about it, because of this uncertain love. He doesn’t know if the woman he loves has betrayed him with his best friend.

The film tells the story of obsessive love, with the Resistance more as a backdrop. Can love, when it strikes at the heart of a man, cause him to set all ideology aside?
It can. It happens to our character, but the film also tells the story of Fascism from that time. The scene in which we see the little girl, still alive, lying with her family, who have been exterminated as accommodated the partisans, is a true story that we were told when working on The Night of the Shooting Stars. The little girl tried to sleep next to her mother, thinking they were all resting there on the ground. It's not just the protagonist who goes crazy with love like Orlando, who no longer understands anything. The story follows him, and others.

Back to the film. It's the first one that you’ve directed solo without your brother...
Getting older, I didn't think I'd end up directing a film on my own. It was unexpected. But that's life, we get old, we get ill. The important thing is to try not to be overwhelmed, and that's what Vittorio and I did. We worked together, wrote the film together, I sent him the dailies, we phoned each other (and often argued). Everything continued as before, more painfully obviously, because he's not here. But despite Vittorio's absence, it was a great working experience, thanks to the story, the place, the actors, and above all, the crew. There was a feeling of solidarity among us, perhaps because they thought I needed comforting... I felt very protected.

You’re not new to world of literary adaptations. How much freedom did you take with Fenoglio's book? How did you adapt the book into a film?
In general we don't tend to translate the books, we choose a story because we recognise certain feelings on the pages that we’re interested in representing in film form. And in order to do so, we end up betraying the text in some way, because cinema isn’t literature, it is a whole different way of thinking and expressing itself. We thanked Fenoglio, and then embarked on our own journey. Most of the time we end up facing problems that aren’t so much about being different, but more about recognising feelings within ourselves that we have not yet expressed. This book gave us the opportunity to express our concerns and tell them in film form. As Pirandello once said, a story is like an empty bag, crumpled on the ground, it cannot stand upright unless you fill it with your feelings and emotions.