On Tragedy, Beauty, and the Cell: An Interview with the Taviani Brothers

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have been making visionary films for more than four decades, but sometimes it feels like they've been gone from American screens for so long that very few people here remember them. Hopefully that injustice will be partly undone by the release on these shores of their latest, the compact and beautiful Caesar Must Die, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin last year. (Go here to read David Edelstein’s rave.)

The film portrays a group of inmates in Italy’s Rebibbio Prison putting on a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The film's actual cast consists of the same inmates, playing themselves playing the parts, and the film was shot in the prison. As in so many of their other works, the Tavianis blur the lines between the modern and the mythic, between emotional immediacy and the impulse to deconstruct, to analyze. They highlight the physicality of the actors -- the film is full of the earthiness and immediacy so characteristic of their work -- even as they depict the transcendental quality of these forgotten individuals' encounter with great art. (In some weird way, in its blending of the intimate with a distant poeticism, the film reminds me of Visconti's La Terra Trema.) Meanwhile, the production of this most canonical of plays -- Shakespeare's most incantatory work, here revised to fit the actors' varied dialects -- spills out from the stage of the prison into its cells and common spaces. So much so that it becomes almost a cubist meditation on the enclosure of the self. As the inmates broaden their personal and psychological horizons, the Tavianis’ aesthetic entraps them further.

So, the film is magnificent, though perhaps it doesn't have the more accessible, epic grandeur of some of the Tavianis' better-known works. Indeed, at some point in the 1970s and 80s, these filmmakers were an international phenomenon, and deservedly so. I can think of few films greater than Night of the Shooting Stars, with Allonsanfan, Kaos, and Padre Padrone (which won a controversial Palme d'Or at Cannes back in the day) following close behind. I'd also highly, highly recommend the English language Good Morning Babylon, an exquisite, sweeping, and decidedly weird drama of two Italian brothers who come to the U.S. and wind up working on the set of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. It was made at the height of their popularity, and flopped mightily -- suffering, perhaps, from the fact that the Tavianis were directing American and English actors, with an English-language screenplay, even though they themselves speak very little English. Nevertheless, as a teenager, I think I saw it something like twenty times. Get over the crazy dialogue, and it's amazing. (I bet it plays great in Italian, with subtitles.)

During the last New York Film Festival, I got to realize a lifelong dream of speaking to the Tavianis about the new film, and their work in general. Here's what came of it.

“Blessed Are the Young Who See What Isn’t There”: On the Final Moments of 1900

Bernardo Bertolucci’s mesmerizing, towering 1900 is hitting Blu-Ray thanks to Olive Films, and I haven’t been this excited about a release in quite some time. When I saw it again at MoMA last year, I was quite shaken for some days afterwards. There’s something about 1900 that puts every other movie to shame – in its size, scope, and sweep, obviously, but also in the fact that you can’t just shrug your shoulders at it. It provokes an emotionally violent response, regardless of whether you love it or hate it. You might even do both. At 317 minutes, there’s a lot of movie in there.

"Simplicity and Irony": Nanni Moretti on Popes, Politicians, and Cannes

When the Italian actor-director Nanni Moretti’s new film We Have a Pope premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, some critics were perplexed. Moretti, an outspoken leftist and a longtime atheist, had skewered religious piety in The Mass is Ended (1985) and had not long ago made some waves with his incendiary satire of Silvio Berlusconi, The Caiman (2006). But We Have a Pope was a seemingly gentler film – a comic drama of a newly elected Pope (Michel Piccoli) who, suffering an existential crisis, flees the Vatican and wanders among the people of Rome, visiting with a psychotherapist and reliving his youthful dreams of becoming an actor. And yet it contained a subtler, more humanist critique of the Papacy, underlining the tension between the power of the office and the messy, all-too-human thoughts and needs of the people who inhabit it. But this sort of humanism has always been the hallmark of Moretti , an iconic figure in Italy and Europe who isn’t particularly well known in the U.S. (Although his 1993 film Caro Diario [Dear Diary], was a small arthouse hit.) I sat down with him during a recent visit to New York, to talk about his new film, crossing Silvio Berlusconi, making political movies, and much more.

Do You Know What It Means to Lose Ettore Scola?

First things first: No, he’s not dead. Rather, the great Italian writer-director Ettore Scola, who gave us We All Loved Each Other So Much, Le Bal, La Terrazza, La Nuit de Varennes, The Family, Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (aka Down and Dirty),  Passione d’Amore, and the little-seen but wonderfully-titled -- and just plain wonderful -- Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?, just announced his retirement, at the age of 80. (He’s 80?? But then, that would make me….rgahaaaaggh…) 

I felt a little chill up my spine upon reading the announcement, because, I shit you not, I had just the previous night finally caught up with his long-hard-to-find 1964 directorial debut, the portmanteau comedy Let’s Talk About Women, and halfway through watching it I had the strange premonition that I was going to wake up to the news that Scola (about whom I had not thought for some time, admittedly) had died. Instead I woke up to the news that he’s finally retired, citing “production and distribution requirements [he] can no longer identify with.” ("I didn't want to become one of those old ladies who wear high heels and lipstick just to keep youthful company,” as he put it.) I guess that’s not as bad. But still. Waaah.