Three years after the loss of his brother Vittorio, with whom he shared his enti
Three years after the loss of his brother Vittorio, with whom he shared his entire career, Paolo Taviani returns to the works of Luigi Pirandello, which the pair adapted in 1984 (Chaos) and 1998 (You Laugh). In keeping with the Sicilian playwright’s vision, the film is not at all what it appears to be. The title may come from a 1910 novella, but there is no trace of that book’s jealousy-riddled plot. Instead, the focus is on Pirandello himself, or rather, his ashes, which are transported from a hasty burial site in fascist Rome to a permanent resting place in Sicily, on a trek that takes us through post-war Italy and its filmed memories, as seen in newsreels, amateur films and fragments of Neorealism. Having buried the master, Leonora addio then shifts gear from road movie to film adaptation, but here it picks a different Pirandello story, namely the last one, written shortly before his death in 1936. From the farewell of the title to its return to the writer’s last words, it is hard not to read this work, so free and yet so much a part of the Taviani world, as a moving brotherly farewell which, just as in 2012’s Golden Bear winner Caesar Must Die, once again uses cinema to give voice to literature and history.
以皮兰德娄的身后骨灰为始发点,巨大的争议与巨大的荣耀都曾聚焦于这位作家身上,回溯那“恐怖、野蛮、挣扎的十年”,藉由魂归大海而达成漫长的告别;未完成的告别则不仅是皮兰德娄遗作——《钉子》化为影片第二部分,更是“To my brother”——保罗·塔维亚尼对哥哥的纪念,两部分的捏合通过一位作家和黑白/彩色的切换达到转承。