Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Toni Servillo, Salvatore Ficarra, Valentino Picone
Intro:
... predominantly entertaining, part whimsical and part eerie, and the murky brown/green cinematography – like a Caravaggio or a Velasquez come to life – is a treat.
It’s 1921, and the groundbreaking playwright – and future Nobel prize winner for literature – Luigi Pirandello (Toni Servillo) has returned to Sicily for the eightieth birthday of his mentor. That’s the premise of this distinctive film, but what follows is a classic case of ‘wheels within wheels’. Pirandello meets a couple of funeral workers and aspiring actors (played by real-life comedy duo Salvatore Ficarra and Valentino Picone). The two are themselves involved in writing and staging plays.
As the plot thickens, Pirandello encounters a variety of colourful individuals, and has both his imagination fired and his memory jogged. All of which will serve as inspiration for his masterpiece, Six Characters In Search Of An Author. It is, perhaps, not insignificant that Six Characters … itself concerns a troupe of actors who are preparing to rehearse a recent play by Pirandello.
Strangeness certainly has its moments – the ‘play within the play’ being the best of them. It’s an intriguing, clever and sometimes obscure film, which raises a lot of questions. (e.g. How much and who is real, how much of the story is fantasy?) Unfortunately there are other – unintended – questions for an international or non-Italian speaking audience, or those who know little about Pirandello or the intermittent folkloric and cultural allusions. Plus, there’s apparently a lot of word play which literally gets lost in translation. All that said, it’s predominantly entertaining, part whimsical and part eerie, and the murky brown/green cinematography – like a Caravaggio or a Velasquez come to life – is a treat. And it’s always good to watch the great Toni Servillo.
