Direction: Paolo Taviani
Country: Italy
Italian filmmaker Paolo Taviani dedicates Leonora Addio to his late brother, Vittorio, with whom he worked all his life. Together, they won the Berlin Golden Bear in 2012 with Caesar Must Die, in which inmates of Rebibbia Prison perform Shakespeare. Now, directing alone, Taviani won the prize again, with this lugubrious drama composed of two parts. The first of which set in post-war Italy and centered around the funeral of playwright Luigi Pirandello (awarded Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934), whose ashes are to be taken from Rome to his hometown in Sicilia’s countryside. The second part is a decent staging of The Nail, one of Pirandello’s short stories, where an immigrant Italian boy kills a young girl in Brooklyn.
This is not the first time that Pirandello has inspired Taviani; Kaos (1984) and You Laugh (1998) are two more favorable cases. Politically charged, the film is a dead-serious, mournful ballad with sparse lines and inexistent twists. At once sketchy and cerebral, this marginally intriguing film struggles to keep its disparate parts together. Skimming the surface is not elucidative enough about Taviani’s purpose, and I really feel he didn’t succeed in this aspect.
The centre fails to hold, lashed around in an intellectual straitjacket, so the plot never wraps up appropriately. Although crossed by some beautiful cinematic imagery, Leonora Addio hardly seems more than an experimental exercise.
