Roberto Andò
La Stranezza

Certain miracles sometimes happen, of course, they need to be found with a lantern, but that's it.

Like in 2022, in an autumn like many others, "La stranezza" directed by Roberto Andò hits the cinemas. He has always moved with dignity, between good films ("Viva la libertà", 2013) and others less interesting ("Le confessioni", 2016), and indeed comes out with a film about theater, reality becoming fiction and vice versa, and with Toni Servillo, who the year before had already starred in a film where theater was the engine of the film, "Qui rido io" by Mario Martone, a beautiful one to catch up on. Assisting him are Ficarra and Picone who, it must be said, have proven themselves as actors after shedding the skin of TV comedians and their popcorn flicks destined for box-office hits (even though sometimes, as in "L'ora legale", 2017, not to be disregarded) in "Bàaria" (2009) by Peppuccio Tornatore.

In essence, we are in Sicily in 1920, and two undertakers with theatrical ambitions cross paths with Luigi Pirandello. Stop, that's the plot, nothing else can be said if you don’t want to spoil the movie. It's beautiful, in the fullest sense of the word. In a Sicily splendidly captured by Maurizio Calvesi, moves an underbrush of individuals more or less crude, each with skeletons in their closets to keep hidden (the big shot at the Municipality pocketing bribes on graves and niches at the cemetery; scattered lovers and badly hidden flings), where theater and poetry seem the only way to escape the squalor of provincial life where dreaming of Rome and taking an eternity just to reach Catania is a norm.

But what is real, or what is not? What are the famous masks of Pirandello? Pirandello came after the verists, after art, theater, painting had finally depicted reality. In the 19th century, the macchiaioli emerged (in Tuscany), who, having had enough of Madonnas and children, Magi and annunciations, painted the landscapes familiar to them, the fields, the toil of man, the plows, the oxen. It's an Italy that is uniting but, at least in art, tends to quite decisively regionalize, yet one line is common: to tell the truth. Verga, as we are taught in school, was the father of verismo, and it’s the encounter between Verga and Pirandello that is the high point of the film, because in a work that undoubtedly aims to be commercial, having inserted such an intimate, profound and at the same time simple moment is a small example of what Italian cinema could be, if it only wanted to be.

Pirandello: “I have in mind a strangeness that has almost become an obsession.” And Verga: “You have placed a bomb under the building that we have laboriously constructed.” Chapeau.

Pirandello is portrayed by Servillo with grace and sharpness, without frills or affectation, without wanting to outshine, but often leaving the true sense of words to silences and glances. Unlike "Qui rido io" where the portrayal of Eduardo Scarpetta was purposely over the top (see the finale), here Pirandello is an extraordinarily lonely man, obsessed with his ghosts, his memories and his characters (whom he grants audience every Sunday from 8 to 13, but now there are too many, too demanding and too pedantic), entangled in his inability to understand his wife's madness.

Yet it is a comedic film, or rather a tragic comedy, or a comic tragedy. Ficarra and Picone on stage are a force of nature, and some sequences are anthology-worthy (the séance or, better yet, the opening night), despite the necessity of telling a fake story passing it off as real reducing pure fun moments, and thus the classic gags are banned in favor of comedy more emerging from context than classic sketches. Without catchphrases (apart from one, "I score and I'm happy") and with a desire to go beyond the shallows that so much Italian comedy cinema has accustomed us to in recent years, so much so that "La stranezza", at times seems a film written by Camilleri, or at least, something that the father of Montalbano would have liked very much.

The high and the low blend continuously (Ficarra and Picone's audacious amateurism and Pirandello's genius), opposites touch (Servillo and Renato Carpentieri, close to less significant character actors) and with complete courage, like in the finale where for ten minutes a part of "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is staged, a complex work where nothing appears true and yet nothing seems false, simultaneously, and a Seneca quote ("Who is it?", "One who knew it long"). Here, a film so intelligent and witty grossed nearly 6 million euros, and that’s something to be happy about, because perhaps, in the end, all is not lost.

Let's say, the details. In a pre-twentieth-century Sicily truer than true (but it’s fiction, please) the care in costumes and sets is impressive. Shot between Erice, Palermo, and Catania, "La stranezza" possesses a subtlety of storytelling and rhythm fluidity that amaze. In the finale, with the entrance of Luigi Lo Cascio, the rhythm intentionally becomes monotonous, the claustrophobic setting and the hanging conclusion pose unresolved questions which are the works of Pirandello’s and Roberto Andò’s ingenuity.

A beautiful film, which perhaps suffers from the continual alternation between dialect and Italian (perhaps writing it all in Sicilian would have been better) but does not leave a bitter aftertaste and feels too short. Now our heroes, Ficarra and Picone, along with Servillo, seem to be returning in garibaldian outfits. Let’s hope for the best.