The Agnelli family’s “missing piece” shows up at Turin
Unlike in factories, in life “spare parts” don’t exist. Missing parts, however, do and Italy’s Agnelli family (behind Fiat) knows this all too well. Il pezzo mancante (“The Missing Piece”) by Giovanni Piperno looks at several of theirs, though perhaps should just have kept it at just one. Because 72 minutes are too many for tackling the country’s true “ruling family”, its “removed” member – “A metaphorical removal of our country,” says the director – and the most secret figures of a family tree that today struggles to calculate all its branches.
Piperno says the initial idea was to make a film on Giorgio Agnelli, the “crazy” brother of patriarch Gianni Agnelli, who was institutionalized up until his death in a Swiss psychiatric clinic, far from indiscreet eyes. All that’s left of him are the memories of those who loved him (certainly not his family members) and a bronze statue. Then, perhaps because of a lack of resources and material, the filmmaker decided to shift his attentions to Edoardo, the son and designated heir of Gianni, who killed himself at the age of 46 in 2000.
“The underlying idea was always to start with an individual through which to recount all the others,” adds Piperno, who co-wrote the film, his first historical documentary, with Giulio Cederna. “I wasn’t used to not being able to know the protagonists of my films, and this is a film on the Agnellis without the Agnellis”.
Interviews with friends (especially Gelasio Gaetani Lovatelli) and archive interviews flank the “official story” of the Agnelli dynasty, that of young Edoardo, who was handsome and elegant like his father, but considered a “heretic”, fascinated as he was by Islam and critical of capitalist culture, who said that the “love of money is more dangerous than drugs”.
Given the complexity of the subjects, what emerges is an inevitably blurry portrait that on hagiography. More interesting is the film’s thriller feel, at times even horror, that Piperno evokes in long tracking shots in the family’s buildings, to create a disturbing atmosphere not unlike in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned.
Il pezzo mancante is produced by Gabriella Buontempo and Massimo Martino for Goodtime, in collaboration with RAI Cinema and Cinecittà Luce, the latter which also handles international sales.
(Translated from Italian)
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