04/10/2010

Rather than Una Sconfinata Giovinezza [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (“Endless Youth”), explains Pupi Avati in reference to the title of his latest film, “it should have been called An Endless Childhood”: “At this time in my life, having reached the second part of the second half, I can feel stirring within me the eight-year-old child I thought I had silenced and forgotten”.

Known for his affectionately nostalgic films, the Bologna-born director has chosen to explore his own memories (his parents who died in a car accident, the “self-sufficient games” in provincial Emilia Romagna) in a painful yet serene story. It centres on Lino (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) and Chicca (Francesca Neri, making her third film with Avati), two respected professionals who have been happily married for many years: “How do you say when someone buts in and interrupts two people who are talking?”. Lino works with words, he’s a sports journalist, and this question is the first sign of his developing Alzheimer’s, which pitilessly erases the medium and short term, bringing back to the surface only memories of a distant past.

In the film, this form of regression is rendered by alternating temporal levels, and in the sepia-toned flashbacks (lensed by DoP Pasquale Rachini), filled with typically Avati-esque characters and atmospheres.

“Alzheimer’s is the disease of the relatives, not the patients”, explained the director, referring to the suffering experienced by those who have to deal with a family member who, sooner or later, stops recognising even those closest to them: “I didn’t want to speculate about the pain, add despair to despair, but describe how the disease, although terrible, is an experience that can be welcomed into our life”.

He asked his actors for “actorial discretion”, and he got this, especially from Bentivoglio, in a role that according to the actor “is a gift, but at the same time a hot potato”. He continued: “This film can be seen as a children’s fairy tale: Chicca and Lino love each other so much, but they haven’t been able to have children: until Lino returns to a childlike state, and Chicca finds herself looking after the son she never had”.

This almost “poetic” interpretation echoes that of Neri, who sees in the film “a sense of hope, a marital love that becomes maternal”.

These important themes “go against the tide of contemporary Italian cinema”, explained Avati, who seems to have got over the film’s exclusion from competition at the Venice Film Festival (the controversy dominated the pages of daily newspapers for much of August). He does however make a controversial comment when speaking of “distributor 01’s cautiousness”: the director implies that the mere 200-print run planned for its release shows the company has little faith in the film’s potential.

The box office will be the judge: produced by Antonio Avati for Duea Film and Rai Cinema, Una Sconfinata Giovinezza will be released in theatres on October 8.

(Translated from Italian)