A different Leopardi, far from the stereotype of the sad and solitary poet, but vital to the point of becoming an example and source of identification for the new generations. This is what emerged yesterday from the press conference of “Leopardi – The Poet of Infinity”the Rai event series directed by Sergio Rubini, previewed out of competition at the Venice Film Festival.
An emblematic title for the many facets of Giacomo’s personality – as everyone called him – with the infinite as his gaze on the world. That gaze which, as the director of Rai Fiction Maria Pia Ammirati underlined, is not nihilistic but vital: «Nihilism and pessimism are actually the vital soul that Rubini managed to bring out – she said – because Leopardi is the poet of the everyday who clashes with the everyday itself. In this sense he is profoundly contemporary».
«Redeeming the character from the image of the poet delivered to his own pain and solitude» is the attractive idea of the project according to Beppe Caschetto, producer of the series for IBC Movie. A project conceived twenty years ago and realized after an intense research work by the director and co-writers Carla Cavalluzzi and Angelo Pasquini. «We discovered a multifaceted and unprejudiced thinker, different from what we had studied at school – specified the director Rubini –; set on fire by the patriots, he then nurtured suspicions about their way of doing politics. Perpetually pulled by the jacket of those who wanted to make him a hero of the Risorgimento, or a nihilist, or a convert on the point of death, Leopardi was so innovative that he escaped any label: he was a free spirit, unprejudiced and perpetually young. We represented him without a hump to highlight the morphology of thought rather than physicality».
The film in fact tells the story of a man with a lively, even ironic, mind («In the “Operette Morali” he is a comedian», says Rubini), as well as an existentialist ante litteram.. «Interested in living and for this reason an existentialist poet, already in the nineteenth century he spoke of boredom, tedium, and other typically twentieth-century themes». A fiction that follows the innovative formula of making cinema also through TV, structured more on the man’s thought than on the chronology of events, with the cult film “Amadeus” by Milos Forman as a guiding star: «Mozart never met Salieri – Rubini recalls – and yet Forman and the author of the play Peter Shaffer had the courage to introduce them; and in that film, more than Mozart’s life, all of “Mozartism” was contained. We do the same with Leopardi’s thought».
The identification with a character who is perpetually young is inevitable for the equally young protagonist Leonardo Maltese, born in 1997: «Giacomo experiences a conflict with his father, like any teenager. He wrote “L’infinito” when he was twenty, and like any person of that age he experiences pain as something great, that has the feel of infinity».
The actors Alessio Boni and Valentina Cervi give a face to the poet’s parents, Monaldo and Adelaide. “Alda Merini used to say ‘He who loves his children too much, often sacrifices them to his own ego’. Monaldo does the same with his son – says Boni -. Reading one of his poems he recognizes in Giacomo a talent superior to his own, and the visceral love for his son is tinged with envy and bigotry, and other peculiarities that have attracted me more and more to the character”. “In the “Zibaldone” Leopardi describes the mother as a woman incapable of empathy and compassion – says Cervi -. Throughout the filming I tried to find a sign of fragility in this woman with a mania for control, unloving, crazy, totally enslaved to a bigoted Christianity, typical of the Marche of that period; and I saw a woman prisoner of her own cage, feeling tenderness and compassion for her”. The cast also includes Alessandro Preziosi. Co-produced by Rai Fiction and Rai Com, the series will be broadcast on December 16th and 17th on Rai1 in two prime time evenings.
Around Giacomo the face and passion of three talents from the South
In the life of the great poet from Recanati, narrated by the series “Leopardi – The poet of infinity”, some emblematic figures, part of a perfect directorial architecture, but also pieces necessary to render the complexity of the figure and the modern and innovative thought. Among these, three talents from the South, great professionals with successful works behind them. Fresh from the fiction “Vanina – Un vicequestore a Catania”, the actress from Menfi (Agrigento), former Miss Italy, Giusy Buscemi plays the noblewoman Fanny Targioni Tozzetti, Leopardi’s last and painful love, who associated her with Aspasia, wife of Pericles, in the famous and homonymous poem he wrote in 1834, the most autobiographical. “She has been handed down to history as the woman who made him suffer by making fun of him – Buscemi tells us – In reality she had a different desire from his, being in love with Antonio Ranieri, a friend of the poet”. A typically nineteenth-century character, but also very contemporary. “Fanny is sweet and maternal with her daughters, unprejudiced, passionate about literature and melancholic. A woman with many and beautiful facets, more modern than ever”.
To give a face to Antonio Ranieri, the faithful and devoted friend, Christian Caccamofrom Taurianova in Reggio. «He is his companion for the last six years of his life and never abandons him until his death – says the actor – . Antonio lives a relationship of brotherly love with Giacomo, a heartbreaking feeling, which divides him between betrayal and passion: taken by love for Fanny, but killed by the awareness of betraying his friend. The series tells this feeling in all its facets and Antonio represents this split».
An interpreter loved by Marco Bellocchio, for whom he was Giovanni Falcone in “The Traitor” and Francesco Cossiga in “Esterno Notte”, the Palermo native Fausto Russo Alesi plays the writer Pietro Giordani. A historically important and complex figure, who for Leopardi represents a positive fatherhood. “Giordani is almost a second father,” he tells us. “A good father to the extent that he tries to get him out of the closed and bigoted environment and place in which he lives, because he senses his genius. In him we find on the one hand a total devotion to this talent, on the other a flash of inspiration, a form of love towards a young man whose early education is very similar to his, because Giordani also lived a conformist life from which he emancipated himself. He therefore tries to pass all this on to Giacomo, who has a great culture in his eyes and heart, but needs to have life experiences.”
The three interpreters underline in unison the punctual and refined work of the director Sergio Rubini both on the acting interpretation and on the recovery of the nineteenth-century dialect. «The screenplay is very accessible but also full of many Leopardian words – adds Alesi – It was therefore necessary to restore the beauty of the words, later found in the script. Sergio’s work was vibrant at every moment. The fact that he is also an actor makes him a traveling companion with a wonderful sensitivity».