Among the most anticipated events of the Messina Film Festival is the meeting with the director who has most represented Sicily in cinema, the Oscar winner Giuseppe Tornatore, protagonist of an event on Tuesday 3 December at the Sala Laudamo, in which the relationship between the his works and opera. Via video link, the director from Bagheria spoke with the Messina journalist Franco Cicero before the screening of “They’re all fine”, the 1990 film, with Marcello Mastroianni, which reveals his passion for opera, born during childhood thanks to his grandfather maternal, street vendor and great music lover. «Twice a year he took me to the performances of the orchestra of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo for the Feast of San Giuseppe, and we listened to pieces taken from titles such as “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “La Traviata”. As a record collector I then began to investigate the works, studying their origins and characteristics, as well as following with great interest films based on the opera, including Comencini’s “La bohème” and Zeffirelli’s opera films».
The inevitable question is about any proposals for opera direction, as happened to Marco Bellocchio with “Rigoletto a Mantua” (2010), filmed in the locations of Verdi’s tragedy. «Since 1990 about 90% were on “Cavalleria Rusticana”. I refused because I found it banal that a Sicilian director would try his hand at that work as his first directorial of the genre.” Although Tornatore has never explicitly used operatic arias in his films, in “Stanno tutti bene” there are elements of strong reference, starting from the guiding theme and the cameo of Morricone, who conducts the orchestra in “La Traviata” at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, at the request of Mastroianni. «Since the protagonist was a melomaniac, who named his children after some characters in the opera, Ennio composed the main theme of the film with influences from Verdi, Mozart and Bellini, in which the homage to the genre was clear. And that scene in the theater is the most explicit reference to the opera in all of my cinema.”
In the film, in fact, Matteo Scuro (Mastroianni) calls his daughters Norma and Tosca, like the protagonists of Bellini and Puccini’s masterpieces, and his three sons Caino (“Pagliacci” by Leoncavallo), Guglielmo (“Guglielmo Tell” by Rossini) and Alvaro (Don Alvaro from Verdi’s “La forza del Destino”). «I loved the authors, but there was no intention of linking the fate of the characters in the film to that of the protagonists of the works». A film born during the negative period of “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso” and of extreme relevance, in which Tornatore entrusts his characters with the veiled denunciation of what was not working in our country: «These were the years in which Italy was described by politicians as a nation that was making it, when in reality it was starting to demonstrate some major critical issues in the social fabric. Through the story of this group of children scattered across Italy and Matteo’s surprise visit, there was the ambition to feel the pulse of the situation, ranging from politics to the media and everything that was being created in life citizens’ daily lives. We were already talking about certain themes, but I liked the idea of summarizing everything with the staging of these brothers intent on not disappointing their father, as a staging of the country that is making it. It is therefore an ambitious film, full of flaws, but sincere.”
But what is Tornatore’s daily relationship with music? «I have always included an original musical score in my films – he said – Music has the same rights as other components, it must arise from the story. I work by listening to music of different genres, except when editing, because experimenting with repertoire music on the scenes to be edited is a huge mistake. At that stage, the film is like a dry sponge and the music you roll over it is like cool water, so it seems to work perfectly. A film, on the other hand, must work in editing without music, or when you go to edit you must have the music composed for your film to place on top.”
