I’ve been asking Italian filmmakers about their favorite movies.
When I am talking to Italian directors, actors, and producers they are usually talking about the film that they are promoting, rightly so, and I decided to ask them what else they’re watching and liking these days, films made by other people.
I’m starting with one of my favorite actresses, Bianca Nappi, star of Alberto Caviglia’s ‘Pecore in Erba’ (Burning Love), Ferzan Ozpetek’s Mine Vaganti (Loose Cannons), and Duccio Chiarini’s I Dolori del Giovane Edo (Short Skin).
In Pecore in Erba, a film that wowed audiences at the 2015 Venice Film Festival, Nappi plays the adoring sister of a famous, young anti-semite (it’s a comedy, you heard me, it’s a hilarious lampoon of religious intolerance). She’s an absolute ironic genius, walking that fine line between zany and realistic, a classic “straight-man” in the midst of the outrageous satire.
Bianca told me, “When we started shooting Pecore in Erba I was excited and very focused about my character because we all knew it would be a complex work. The whole movie is in fact based on a delicate balance between satire and reality, an interesting challenge! Honestly I knew in my heart it could become a big deal, but until it was out at the Venice Festival, you never know..”
“I think that the cinema produced by a country respects its social reality, economy and culture, and in the last five or six years there has been a rebirth in Italy, above all with directors and auteurs that are the true spirit of cinema, in my opinion,” says Nappi. “Maybe the economic crisis that Italy has gone through and is going through has served to eliminate the superfluous and made us return to our origins, that is to say making films that are more sincere and more original. We actors can’t do anything but follow this current and help the directors realize their visions.
So what film does Bianca recommend? One that I have never seen (but it’s on my list of “films to see ASAP”).
“Among modern Italian films, without a doubt one of my favorites is Matteo Garrone’s ‘L’imbalsamatore’ (The Embalmer), a powerful film noir about love and desire. If you haven’t seen it, see it!”
A 2002 film that the New York Times said that the “tricky comedy thriller The Embalmer subjects it to a diabolical homoerotic twist”, it stars Ernesto Mahieux, Valerio Foglia Manzillo and Elisabetta Rocchetti.
In what they call a “psychosexual power struggle”, Valerio (Valerio Foglia Manzillo) a handsome young guy begins working with Peppino (Ernesto Mahieux), a taxidermist and embalmer, a gay man pretending to be heterosexual.
I Love Italian Everything 