La stranezza

A man attends by pure chance the rehearsals of a theatrical piece inspiring himself for his new work. For him, this show takes the form of a painting within another painting like a kaleidoscope that mixes life with theatre, writing with literature, actors with ordinary people. The disarming strangeness with which the amateur actors try to keep the theater group together and complete the show, inspires this witness to write his new work to which he gives the title "Six characters in search of an author" by Pirandello who invites the actors at first unaware of such empirical foundation. Maria Pia.

Not a lot to say about this movie. It's a fictionalized biopic about Pirandello, a famous writer and playwright, coming back to Sicily to meet with another famous writer and meanwhile having to deal with a creative block. He's helped by two strange but endearing funeral home workers/aspiring artists. The story on the surface contains a lot of Pirandello's core themes, like the idea of madness hiding under the surface of normalcy, of masks and lack of identity, of "strangeness". Pirandello went on to write (in this movie and in real life) Six Characters in Search of an Author, a meta-play about actors rehearsing a play and being interrupted by six characters without a writer that enter the theater and ask the guy in charge of rehearsal to write their stories, and then the story continues into this one arc structure for the entire play. The movie successfully depicts a story that, in itself, could have been written by Pirandello, if he ever did movies. The cinematography is pretty good although a bit standard, the editing is fast paced and makes for an entertaining watch. Toni Servillo basically plays the same character he plays always: the classy, reserved and troubled yet sentimental intellectual. But he does so pretty well so what's there to say? Ficarra & Picone work decently, but I personally don't really like how repetitive and predictable their screen presence and dynamics and deliveries are: they also play the same characters in every movie, Ficarra is the more crass, materialistic, sarcastic, "patriarchal" italian guy, Picone is the (too) sensitive and compliant one (and for some reason always ends up having an affair with Ficarra's sister in every movie). They work way less than Servillo because their characters only serve the purpose to be "fascinating" to Pirandello, that sees their weirdness and stupidity and finds it cute and charming. There's not a lot of depth, not a lot of meaning to their existence. Moreover, this movie suffers from the same affliction of every biopic about creative people, which is: "I don't know how I show the main character having an idea". In this case they work around it by playing on the idea that some of the stuff we see is not strictly real but imagined. It sort of works, but it just ends up being one of those movies where you can fill in the gap only knowing the real story of the real character. You don't get a lot of enjoyment if you don't know who Pirandello is, you don't really feel for his character all that much. The "weirdness" in the title that connects the strange slice of humanity in the film is never really explained, it's just left at the level of "people are weird and funny to look at sometimes". And again, you can understand by knowing Italian literature beforehand, but I personally think a movie should not take the audience's cultural knowledge as a basis. It's definitely a more clever example of biopic, because it integrates a core theme of the author's work into the story with intelligence, making the entire plot basically revolve around it, but it still leaves you a bit unsatisfied. I guess that nobody really cares, and the people that go and watch the movie know exactly what to expect and what ideas are celebrated (because they know the author). So if you just want a movie that reminds you of why this author is great, then this movie is for you: it's well made, competently directed and comfortably unchallenging.

This movie deals with the classical subject of an artist struggling to come up with a new creative idea. The way this. In this case we have Pirandello and a series of circumstances that lead him to one of his great dramaturgical achievements. It's all fiction as far as we know, but it's a good plot.

The problem lies in the execution. Toni Servillo plays again the same character he's been playing since La Grande Bellezza, and it's annoying. I haven't seen him acting a different role since Il Divo, and in any case I refuse to believe Pirandello was such a tight, depressing person.

Verga is also in the film, but only for a very short moment. A pity, it would have been interesting to explore the dynamics and perspectives of the two great Sicilian writers.

The rest of characters are a cliché of Italianism. It's amazing and almost embarrassing how Italians keep portraying themselves in this simplistic, folkloric manner. In this movie, it's a missed opportunity to dive into Pirandello's world.

All in all the movie is ok, it can be watched, but it could have been much better. But hej, it gives us a short performance by Luigi Lo Cascio, which is always a plus.

The film suffers from a common trope of movies where an actor is placed alongside a comedian: the former is put on a pedestal, like a godlike perfect being, and the latter is just a comic relief. The two worlds of Luigi Pirandello and the morticians are so strongly divided in tone that I imagine they shot all the expensive scenes with Toni Servillo in a couple of days, then edited them in the movie in an attempt to pretend all the characters lived in the same world.

But, after a first act of more or less funny jokes, the movie finally explodes in a second act that surprised me in many ways, showing that the until that point pointless series of events is actually aiming somewhere. The movie, in the end, shows a genuine love for theater and Pirandello's work, and even if it is an imperfect movie it perfectly serves as a reminder of how great his work is. I left the theater happy.