How difficult it is to be the son of the genius Pirandello! The Sicilian actor Giancarlo Commare speaks

John

By John

One of the most popular titles at the recently concluded Rome Film Festival, «Eternal visionary», Michele Placido’s film on Luigi Pirandello – freely inspired by Matteo Collura’s book «The game of roles. Extraordinary life of Luigi Pirandello” (Longanesi) – represented a real emotional journey for Giancarlo Commare, born in 1991, from Castelvetrano (Trapani).

The Sicilian actor, former face of Rocco Amato in the soap «Il Paradiso delle Ladies»here he plays Stefano Pirandello, the only one of the sons of the great Agrigento playwright to follow in his artistic footsteps. A fundamental figure in Luigi’s life, but discreet, lived in the shadow of his father and as narrated by the film and played by Commare.

«With words we are able to be more incisive, so if you have a character who can express himself with words you have an extra opportunity – he told us -. The difficulty in giving a face to Stefano was instead working on subtraction: wanting to say something but not being able to say it, because you are that character who has learned to stay in the shadows to respect someone else’s light. In fact, it represented one of the most complex roles I have ever played.” «Stefano has always been his father’s right-hand man – he continues – and, few know it, many works were completed on what his father had left at his death. In the film there is a scene that we shot but then left off-screen in which, at a certain point, when his time has come, Luigi says to Stefano: now it’s your turn.”

The letters that Stefano Pirandello sent to his mother and brothers were fundamental in the documentation and preparation work. «In those letters, in addition to the perception of being in the father’s shadow, the impossibility of helping the mother also emerges. The other interpretive difficulty was in fact calibrating his entire world in the few moments I had available, to the point that, once filming was finished, I would have liked to make a spin-off on this truly singular character.”
For Commare, «Eterno visionario» was also a way of reconnecting with the figure of Luigi Pirandello after «Io sono ANDREA», a play inspired by «Uno, niente, centomila», which he directed. «It has always been a figure that has captured my attention, since I started studying it in high school and later in my artistic career. Thanks to the film it is possible to understand how much Pirandello’s life inspired his works, which were not always understood precisely because many aspects of his private life were not known.

The innovation he brought to his writing and theater corresponded precisely to the way he staged his life in his works. He was a visionary, and when he imagined his characters he really saw them, spoke to them. It brought direct contact between the author and what he wrote and brought to the stage. Pirandello is present in every single character he wrote, not just in the protagonists of his works.”

Other Sicilian performers in the film are Marcello Mazzarella from Erice, Guia Jelo from Catania and Dajana Roncione from Palermo, in the role of father, mother and stepdaughter of the «Six characters in search of an author».