Eight great tastes of Italian life

Twenty classic and contemporary features and documentaries will screen in this year’s annual celebration of Italian filmmaking. James Croot looks at the best.

The 2021 edition of New Zealand’s annual Cinema Italiano has begun its six-month, 20-cinema journey around the nation. This year’s lineup includes 20 features and documentaries, a mix of classic titles and acclaimed recent films screening here for the first time. The film festival’s artistic director Paolo Rotondo says his selections were ‘‘designed to compel audiences to laugh, cry, dream and fall in love all over again’’.

‘‘My approach was to find films or directors that really appealed to me, and that’s why you will see more classics and contemporary classics – all of which help viewers escape to Italia, at least in their hearts and imaginations.’’

Stuff to Watch has a selection of eight great titles we believe are worth checking out.

Bad Tales

This is a sometimes dark coming-of-age drama set in a troubled suburbia struggling to cope with the heat of summer. It’s as much a story of sexual awakenings and fumblings, as it is flawed parenting, with the latter often viewed from a child’s point-of-view.

Winner of the Silver Bear for best screenplay at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, writer-directors Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo’s movie is filled with memorable and haunting imagery.

I Am Love

She has played evil executives, white witches and androgynous angels, but this 2009 film represents Tilda Swinton’s perhaps most significant acting challenge. Playing the adulterous wife and mother of a much-revered Italian industrialist family may not seem like much of a stretch for the Scotswoman, however Swinton had to learn Russian and Italian for the part.

An early effort from director Luca ‘‘Call Me By Your Name’’ Guadagnino, this has the feel of a Douglas Sirk movie of the 1950s (thanks, in part, to its female protagonist, sumptuous settings and deep moral conundrums), even though it is set in the early days of the new millennium.

The Leopard

Based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel of the same name, Luchino Visconti’s 1963 epic (the version screening here clocks in at 185 minutes) focuses on an aristocrat’s attempts to preserve his family’s way of life amid the tumultuous social upheavals of 1860s Sicily. Winner of Cannes’ Palme d’Or, the international cast includes Burt Lancaster, Terence Hill, Alan Delon and Claudia Cardinale.

‘‘Sumptuous and beautiful, suffused with a serene melancholy and deeply ambivalent love for a long-vanished past [this] is one of the greatest of all historical costume epics,’’ wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington.

Marriage Italian Style

One of two Sophia Loren-starring classics featuring at this year’s festival (the other being 1960’s Two Women), this 1964 drama is based on a play by Eduardo De Filippo.

Nominated for two Academy Awards (Best Actress and Best Foreign Language Film), it’s the story of long-running relationship between the rich Domenico Soriano (Marcello Mastroianni) and the penniless prostitute Filumena Marturano (Loren).

‘‘It’s a romantic comedy every bit as delicious as something Howard Hawks might have concocted, with Loren and Mastroianni proving fine rivals for the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant,’’ wrote From the Front Row’s Matthew Lucas.

Martin Eden

Leading man Luca Marinelli deservedly took home the Venice Film Festival’s Volpi Cup for Best Actor for his superb turn as the eponymous aspiring writer in this loose adaptation of Jack London’s classic 1909 novel.

Determined to rise above his humble beginnings, the self-confident Martin also has designs on the well-bred Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), much to the consternation of certain members of her family.

A sweeping, lavish costume drama, director Pietro Marcello makes clever use of 16mm film and stock imagery to give this sometimes painfully intimate tale a big canvas for its wider themes and ideological discussions.

Pavarotti

He was the man who helped bring opera to a whole new audience. The son of an Italian baker who met everyone from koalas to Kofi Annan and became great friends with Princess Diana and Bono’s housekeeper.

Boasting one of the most-recognisable visages (and silhouettes) of the 20th century, ‘‘the King of the high Cs’’ also possessed a stunning tenor singing voice and as, Ron Howard’s impressive 2019 documentary showcases, a sharp sense of humour.

Howard and his team do a great job of mixing the memorable moments with his early struggles to pay the bills, battle against the bulge and the fallout from his decision to start a relationship – and then marry – a woman 34 years his junior.

Pinocchio

Thankfully this is not Roberto Benigni’s critically reviled, much-derided 2002 take on Carlo Collodi’s beloved 1883 novel but rather Matteo Garrone’s more haunting 2019 version, which was nominated for two Oscars.

Benigni is still involved, playing struggling woodcarver Geppetto with the same gusto that earned him an Academy Award for Life is Beautiful, but he’s overshadowed by the excellent effects work, makeup and costuming that brings to life a marvellous array of weird and wonderful characters.

The Traitor

Fans of true-crime tales and modern Italian classics like Gomorrah and Suburra will find themselves thoroughly engrossed in this 150-minute, decade-and-a-half-spanning look at ‘‘boss of two worlds’’ Tomasso Buscetta’s attempts to walk away from a life of crime and become an informant against the Cosa Nostra he believed had departed from its original ideals.

A familiar-looking face to local audiences, thanks to his turns in Hollywood movies like Angels and Demons, My Cousin Rachel and

Rush, Pierfrancesco Favino is a compelling presence as the swaggering Buscetta, a man determined to see justice done, regardless of the personal risk.

The 2021 Studio Italia Cinema Italiano is screening in New Plymouth and Dunedin and will head to Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Waiheke Island, Matakana, Tauranga, Whakata¯ ne, Taupo¯ , Napier, Havelock North, Palmerston North, Masterton, Nelson, Blenheim and Arrowtown over the next few months. See cinemaitalianonz.com