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| Fabrizio Gifuni as Luigi with Anna Mangiocavallo as his little daughter Francesca, discussing Pinocchio |
Francesca Comencini’s enchanted and wise The Time It Takes (Il Tempo Che Ci Vuole, the Opening Night selection of Cinecittà and Film at Lincoln Center's 24th edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema) focuses on the father-daughter bond, specifically that with her own, the filmmaker Luigi Comencini, played by a profoundly moving Fabrizio Gifuni (the opposite of his character in Paolo Virzì’s Human Capital), from the days he directed his revelatory TV series of The Adventures Of Pinocchio in the 1970s, till Francesca herself embarks into moviemaking later on.
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| Fabrizio Gifuni and Anne-Katrin Titze at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center share their memories of watching Luigi Comencini's The Adventures Of Pinocchio Photo: Fabrizio Gifuni |
Gifuni’s Luigi is fantastic in how he elegantly maneuvers the fears his little daughter (Anna Mangiocavallo) faces, be it the scary fangs of a shark in her Pinocchio book, a real-life whale exhibited on the Piazza del Popolo in Rome, a white lie about a basset hound made from clay, or a minor skirmish about justice for a classmate at school. He is always there for her in his own way, making sure that the older Francesca (now played by Romana Maggiora Vergano), when troubles mount, knows that he knows a lie is still a lie.
They have a pact. Life is always first, cinema comes right after. Otherwise you shouldn’t make films at all. Good advice, and true for more than this one profession.
When dad decides that moving to France is the best option, the only way he knows to save his child, she asks: “What will we do in Paris?” “We’ll go to the cinema” is his emphatic response, implying that doing anything else would be silly. The Comencinis’ love for everything connected to moving pictures; restorations of forgotten silent shorts, the haunting memory of a scream for Brigitte Helm’s Antinea in GW Pabst’s Queen of Atlantis, or the tears shed when by chance catching a snippet from Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan on TV, shines through every frame.
Anne-Katrin Titze: My first question, of course, has to be: Who’s your favourite character in Pinocchio?
Fabrizio Gifuni: You know, I have to answer the way Francesca does in the film with Lucignolo (Candlewick), because I think he is the most successfully drawn character in the story and the most important. He sort of helps us to understand what’s going on. But coming in second, if not on the same level are the Cat and the Fox. Especially because in Comencini’s TV version of the Pinocchio story (Le Avventure Di Pinocchio), they were played by two great Italian comic actors, Franco Franchi (as Gatto, the Cat) and Ciccio Ingrassia (as Volpe, the Fox).
AKT: I actually while watching your film now, remembered seeing the series as a child, and how I was so scared of the character of the Snail (Zoe Incrocci as Lumaca), the assistant to the wonderful Gina Lollobrigida.
FG: As La Fatina, yes!
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| Gina Lollobrigida as the Blue Fairy in Luigi Comencini's The Adventures Of Pinocchio series |
AKT: She [the Snail] terrified me.
FG: She terrified me too! Yes!
AKT: It was incredible how memories came flooding back! You are wonderful in the film. I think everybody would wish for a father like that! By the way, today is my father’s 83rd birthday.
FG: Oh! Happy birthday!!!
AKT: I will let him know when I speak with him later! How did it feel playing a version of the father of your director? Is it a special pressure?
FG: On paper from the start it looked like something that could have been very complicated and risky to do. Especially with the director sitting there behind the camera and you’re telling her story and she’s being represented. But by one of those miracles that happen now and then in cinema and not just by miracle, it was all very natural instead.
I’m saying it’s not just a miracle because it was also due to the sensitivity and the talent of Francesca Comencini, who because of her way of doing things was able to put both me and Romana [Maggiora Vergano, playing the adult Francesca] at ease on the set. It could have been very difficult, especially for her, if you think of her playing the part of Francesca who is behind the camera. Francesca made it easier for us to realise that we were just telling a story with great freedom and a great sense of participation.
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| Romana Maggiora Vergano as the older Francesca with Fabrizio Gifuni as her father in Paris |
AKT: You can feel this when watching!
FG: Before we began, Francesca and I could be almost like brother and sister. But I would say on the set, even before shooting began, Francesca was looking at me and listening to me as if I were her father, and this created a great sense of trust between us.
AKT: That’s great.
FG: And it allowed me also to perform at my best.
AKT: You speak one of the most amazing lines on the set in the film: “Life first, then cinema!” It’s so important! I mean, filmmakers, anybody connected to the film world, should be reminded of that ever so often. Did that strike a chord with you as well?
FG: Yes, totally! It’s a thought it would seem obvious that everyone, you know, directors and actors would share. And in theory, rationally, that is certainly the case, but in practice it’s unfortunately very rare. I think that actors, directors tend to defend their own turf and by defending their work, sometimes they just trample on people that are right in front of them.
This is what made Luigi Comencini unusual and different from many. Something that led him to criticise actually some of the great directors, some of the great masters of Italian cinema. What made him unique really was that “life is first!” There’s that scene in the bathroom where both the father and the daughter end up sitting down on the floor and he starts talking about his own career and how he felt inadequate, how he felt like a failure. How he’s criticised by other directors, by others in the field who say that he is “too good.”
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| Filming The Adventures Of Pinocchio in The Time It Takes |
AKT: Yes, too good a person!
FG: Too good! And what is very true of Italian cinema and again what made him very unique, unfortunately there are great directors, great artists, great actors, who are also capable of a high level of cruelty. They are mean. Luigi Comencini was not like that.
AKT: As far as cruelty is concerned, I think you can go anywhere in the world, from Bergman letting actors freeze on an icy sea …
FG: Yes, anywhere!
AKT: “Antinea!” GW Pabst and L’Atlantide! Brigitte Helm as the Queen of Atlantis was the starting point of Comencini’s love of cinema. Did you watch the film in preparation?
FG: Yes!
AKT: Did you watch anything else?
FG: Yes! I did watch the Pabst film that started it all. And then seeing all of those beautiful films of Luigi Comencini from the very first to the last, showed me something and made me appreciate something that is not unfortunately recognised widely. Which is that in this pantheon of Italian cinema where we have these masters like Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, for some reason Luigi Comencini is not there and he fully deserves to be in there and recognised both in Italy and internationally for the great director that he was.
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| The Fox (Giuseppe lo Piccolo) and the Cat (Luca Massaro) in The Time It Takes |
AKT: His daughter and you are doing a lot for that! To help in that effort and have people rediscover him. One of my favourite scenes is after you had gone to the daughter’s French school and the two of you leave. We feel the possible embarrassment and then you start hopping! And you say: “We won!” That’s a lovely moment.
FG: Yes! I love that scene, it’s a beautiful one. A moment like many others in the film which are drawn directly from Francesca’s memories. She wrote them down in a notebook and these memories are sort of tiles in a mosaic that she’s pushed together in this film. It’s a very funny scene but it’s also a scene expressed entirely through the body. That little hop that you talked about. Because the father realises this was embarrassing for the daughter, but that little dance that they do after somewhat de-dramatises the moment because they are accomplices now in what has just happened.
AKT: The feeling that they are accomplices and together in something is so great. It starts with the book and the picture of the whale or the shark. I was a bit confused. What is it?
FG: Ah, good point! In the original book of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, he does not talk about a whale, he talks about a 'pescecane', which is a way of talking about a shark. He talked about a monstrous creature. It resembles much more a shark than it does a whale. It was Walt Disney who decided to have a whale rather than a shark because he didn’t want to scare the children. It just shows you how manipulative Disney can be. Because actually fairy tales should always scare children.
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| Il Tempo Che Ci Vuole poster |
AKT: And they do! It’s such a beautiful scene where your interaction is similar to the hopping. It’s about knowing that children are afraid of certain pages in a beloved book!
FG: Yes!
AKT: I remember vividly being afraid of a page in a book with an owl, who knows why. He, the father you play, knows this fact about her and reacts brilliantly.
FG: Funnily, I lived a scene like that in my own life. And I found the book that scared me. It was at a house in Puglia and I found the book. When I opened it up it was all dog-eared and worn out, that was from my opening it and shutting it, opening it and shutting it.
AKT: What book was it?
FG: My copy of Pinocchio.
AKT: Pinocchio as well! That’s fascinating.
FG: Yes, yes the same book! I brought it to Francesca and that’s the one used in the film!
AKT: Fabrizio, as you know, there is a Monica Vitti retrospective following Open Roads this year. Do you have a favourite Monica Vitti film?
FG: Yes! Jealousy, Italian Style is my favourite. With Marcello Mastroianni and Giancarlo Giannini. She is torn between the two. What you see in that film is just the extraordinary comic talent that Monica Vitti had. To give truth and to restore humanity to these characters and not to reduce them to caricatures. You see that in her whole career ranging from Antonioni to Commedia all'Italiana.
AKT: Thank you!
FG: Thank you and see you at lunch!
