Pinocchio in the Post-2000 Little Italy…

I was writing the review of Comencini's "Pinocchio" when, in doubt that it would not be published on this site (in reality it came out as a TV series and once a TV serial review of mine was not published), I veered, unfortunately, on this tacky and icy slide of "Pinocchio" by Roberto Benigni.

Same theme, two worlds, two historical moments, two ways of conceiving cinema, two almost antithetical philosophies.

The Adventures of Pinocchio by Luigi Comencini (1971) was fundamentally poor, a Rom-Pinocchio, disobedient, ragged, a true rebel (the young Andrea Balestri apparently did not want to memorize the script!) in an equally simple Italy but strongly linked to the reality of the time, with true feelings still expressed with few words and small gestures. A naive story made of authentic things where the bread feels like bread and the dusty avenues really smell of dust.

Benigni's version (2002) is a rich Pinocchio, almost entirely reconstructed in the studio with opulent sets (by Danilo Donati) in a glossy Italy that doesn’t exist, with hyperbolic and grotesque characters, dreamlike lights and photography (by Dante Spinotti) where the protagonist is a 40-year-old puppet, playing the fool but with very little human depth. An unreal Pinocchio, an acrobat and jester, absolutely cold in its inability to express genuine feelings: simply a flesh and blood puppet and nothing more.
I could go on for hours with this parallelism between the two Pinocchios and the two societies they are children of (Italy of the early '70s and that of the flashy 2000s) but I will focus on this two-bit (metaphorical) operetta by Roberto Benigni.

An up-and-down director this last one, on the mediocre end who, as an actor, in my opinion, has contributed very little to cinema, while he had a peak of fame as a great entertainer on television: his real natural habitat. Benigni is a stage animal that CANNOT be constrained by scripts or screenplays. It became clear after watching all his films, little more than just decent. Here it’s “clear” from the start he's pretending and when he pretends, he loses his charge of pure and anarchic spontaneity which has always been the beautiful side of his character.

So in this snobby Pinocchio sharply dressed and with a stellar cast and a budget 10 times that used by Comencini, we do find the original fairy tale by Collodi but amid so much glitter and sparkle the humanity and poetry are completely lost. It's hard to warm up to this Pinocchio half-man and half-fool, utterly fake from start to finish, to a Blue Fairy (still this blessed Nicoletta Braschi?!?!) who is not at all charming and seductive, like an asparagus stalk, or a Kim Rossi Stuart-Lampwick too tidy and charming in a role not believable enough to totally win us over. Not to mention the “appearances” of a practically non-existent and personality-less Geppetto-Giuffrè (do we want to compare him to the Great performance of Nino Manfredi?!), and the Fichi d’India (the Cat and the Fox) which are really pathetic and embarrassing.

A pompous film that would like to enchant us with a thousand special effects (the initial carriage driven by mice however is truly impressive!) but which after a few minutes already shows the strain of a born-old tale without verve, without humanity, with moments of forced emotion that are more soap opera than film. Where everything is excessively polished, glossy, meticulous but which in the end… bores profoundly. There’s no active participation in the narration, there is no pathos, just a simple sterile run-through of episodes devoid of any narrative tension, narrated moreover by a Benigni with a whiny and shrill voice of a faux-youngster truly unbearable. A sequence of stiff sketches good just for the Bagaglino with some rare cinematic invention worthy of the name (the animated piece of wood, the finale with the shadow refusing to go to school, and a few other sparks).

It saddens me to see someone like Benigni, whom I ADORED in l'Altra Domenica or in his rare anarchic-subversive TV interventions, reduced to being a jester on command for children, completely bowing to the services of the God Money himself like this post-2000 Italy, completely subservient to Auditel, to Briacucci, to BerlusconStyle and every credo and party's lackeys. A film born with the intent of conquering Hollywood and sweeping up awards that, upon its release, devoured the cinemas of the entire peninsula with hundreds of scattered copies and an unprecedented advertising hype… a film which despite all efforts, will soon be forgotten in the History of Italian Cinema unlike Comencini’s poor Pinocchio, which still makes its nasty impression.

Benigni: Tié! take that and take it home....

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Other reviews

By Il Tarantiniano

 Benigni’s Pinocchio is a bad film, not because it’s laughably cheap, but because it wastes one of Italy’s most expensive productions.

 The majestic visual technical department completely consumes the substance of the film itself, emptying it of passion and depth.