From the Archive: On HUMAN CAPITAL (Paolo Virzi, Italy, 2013) - Part Two - Tom Ryan talks to director Paolo Virzi, about his screen adaptation of Stephen Amidon's novel.

Paolo Virzi

In a  previous post Tom Ryan spoke to novelist Stephen Amidon  about the adaptation of his novel "Human Capital". In this, the second part of Tom's consideration of the 2013 Italian film Il capitale umano/Human Capital, Tom talks to the film’s director and co-writer, Paolo Virzi. 

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Interview with Paolo Virzi

“Behind the story of the film is our national crisis.”

 

TR: What first drew you to Stephen Amidon’s novel?

 

Paolo Virzi: I realised that it was telling a story that had to do with the globalisation of the financial world and with the conflicts between generations and the influence of familial relationships in this huge suburb of privilege that is our part of the world. So I thought the book was amazing for the way it deals with the wellness-without-happiness that defines the Western world.

It was suggested to me by an Italian novelist, Niccolo Ammaniti. At the time, I was working on a theatrical production and his wife was in the cast. I was reading Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full [1998] and Niccolo said to me, ‘Why don’t you read Human Capital? It’s by a younger novelist with the same skill at representing the discomfort of the new upper class.’ I found it not only did this but also twisted the upper class, the middle-class and the ‘miserable’ together.

 

What you say points to the political edge in all of the film of yours that I’ve seen: for example, Caterina in the City. Social context always seems to be important to them. Is it your view that it’s not worth telling a story unless you do it through the eye of social politics?

 

Let’s say that many of us in the Italian film industry have this nasty habit of infusing our big-screen entertainments with the Big Troubles the world faces. It’s an old habit. I didn’t invent this. It’s something I love in the classical Italian movies. I believe that filmmaking should build something entertaining, but I think the emotion becomes stronger if it prompts you to think about the world you live in. 

I don’t like filmmakers who shout at us, who spell out their points of view explicitly in the dialogue. I like to hide the issues inside so that the viewer can enjoy the movie. But if he likes to explore the meaning of that, there’s another gift waiting for him.

It’s not only there in the work of filmmakers like Francesco Rosi and Elio Petri, which is more obviously oriented towards political commentary, but also in the commedia all’Italiana of Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi and Pietro Germi. They always have something to say about Italian society, something you can consider social commentary. 

I have always liked to do this in my movies. We are now on the border of our downfall, so it’s a moment of anxiety, of concern for the future. So, when Human Capital fell into my hands, I had been looking for something to evoke this anxiety, this discomfort, but in an entertaining way. 

I feel that it is my first duty as a filmmaker to make sure that audiences enjoy themselves. But if you give them something more and if they are adult that is good, especially if they don’t have to pay extra for the ticket.

 

Did you have conversations with Stephen Amidon about the book? Was he involved in your planning?

 

Well, we exchanged opinions by mail. We didn’t meet until the movie was done, last November, when I was directing the last edition of the Torino Film Festival and he was a jury member. I told him of my admiration for his work and he was surprised that someone wanted to make an Italian movie from his story, which is set in Connecticut. But he was very generous with us. He was enthusiastic about our script and this gave us a lot of courage. Now we have become friends and are putting together a story for a new movie.

 

[Spoiler alert for the next question and answer]

 

How did he respond to the changes you’ve made to the plotting of the story and the characters? For example, the Luca character doesn’t die at the end. Why did you change that?

 

The novel contains a huge amount of material, enough for a television mini-series. There are more characters, more points of view and more back-stories than we could deal with. We needed to tell our story in one hour and 50 minutes and to come up with the sharpest structure that we could.

With Luca, I liked the idea that there was only one dead character we needed to deal with and it allowed us to focus on a single issue of “human capital”, the terms of settlement with the family for his death. Luca is punished by the prison sentence he receives. The man who dies is unknown to us. We barely know his name; we just see him for a few minutes, then he is in a coma, then he is dead.

And one more thing, maybe: there’s an old rule that, if a young character, or a boy, or a kid dies in your story, you are blackmailing the audience. I also liked the idea that the last shot of the movie was an exchange of glances between two people who are part of a new generation of Italians and I’m hoping that they’re going to turn the page. 

 

The novel ends with the two women providing us with a glimmer of hope through their relationship, some kind of hope.

 

Some kind, yes. Because in this story, there are no heroes. The victims are guilty. There is no innocence. If Serena and Luca had been able to hide his responsibility, they would have sent the innocent Massimiliano to jail. So, while you’re pushed to empathise with them, they’re making mistakes and doing the wrong thing too. 

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Fabrizio Bruni

This is a group of characters who all make big mistakes. Even a good woman like Roberta, the psychiatrist, who is a generous person but is also implicated for her failure to understand her husband or what is happening. 

This is a story in which you can’t divide the good and the evil. Of course, the two fathers especially… The social climber seems even more horrible than the hedge-fund guy, but you can see his point of view. He’s struggling for his family. 

I like to see the way all of the characters have their reasons, which was helped by the way the story was broken up into chapters, each enabling us to see what’s happening through the experiences of different characters.

 

The book has the death in Chapter 10; you move it to the start. Why?

 

I think it’s an old technique. You start with a noir atmosphere, with a dark atmosphere; you present a critical event; and then you examine how each character’s destiny is connected to that moment.

 

In that context, it’s also haunting to watch this character reappear in each of the stories, walking around as a waiter at the presentation ceremony, and then being carried in on a stretcher as Dino and his wife leave the hospital late at night. 

 

Yes. You’re following different stories but there is an alarm underneath. Did you enjoy that.

 

Yes. I think it worked very well.

 

Did you read the book after watching the film?

 

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Human Capital

Yes, after. And then I looked at the movie again.

 

I don’t think we betrayed the spirit of the book. The deep issues that the book contains is what I fell in love with. That is why my friend Stephen is happy. He also confessed to me that, if he had read the script before he published the novel, he would have made some of the changes that we did. This is a slow-burning thriller.

 

I was interested in the way you make the adult characters, especially the male ones, much harder-edged and less sympathetic than they are in the novel. Even Luca’s uncle becomes sympathetic in the novel.

 

It’s true. The uncle became a very small character in our movie although 

he was very important in the novel. For us, he’s just a two-scenes 

character. And in the novel, Carla [Carrie] is less pathetic and her 

situation is more dramatic. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi gives the character 

a range of faces including the ridiculous sides of this upper-class 

woman. And Dino [Drew] is more désagréable…

 

Disagreeable.

 

Yes. That was me speaking French. I imagine that in Australia you speak every language because you are such a melting-pot of the rest of the world.

 

We eat a lot of food from around the world, especially Italian, but we don’t speak languages as well as we should. We’re a long way away.

 

[Laughs]

 

The Dino character in Australia, and in America too, would be described as a “doofus”. Is that a word you know?

 

No. Can you write it down for me, because I’m going to be pitching the story in the USA. It means he’s a social climber?

 

It does, but it refers more to how pathetic he is. He’s a loser. Much more of a hopeless case than the character in the novel, who’s more of an Everyman. I’m not a doofus… at least, I don’t think I am … but I could have been the character in the novel. [mutual laughter]

Why did you choose Brianza as the setting?

 

Well, it’s the richest area of our country and near the big-business centre of Milan, where we have our stock market. Milano is our New York, our Wall Street. Brianza has a special social and political meaning for us. Because of Berlusconi’s connections with the area, it also suggests something about our recent controversies.

The novel is set in 2000 and the stock market fall that takes place at the end happens immediately after September 11. We moved the chronology to 2010 where in Italy something very specific occurred: in June, our president Berlusconi was saying a crisis doesn’t exist and the restaurants were full. In November and December, it happened that our national debt was attacked by the hedge-fund raiders, we were on the brink of economic collapse, the Prime Minister was forced to resign, and the European banks took control of our country. 

So behind the story of the film is our national crisis. When Carla says – it’s a line that isn’t in the book – “You bet on the downfall of our country and you won,” and her husband answers, “We won,” it refers to what was happening to our country at that moment of history.

During the development of the screenplay, I wanted to know more about the issues that the story raises, so I called on the help of friends who know much more about these things than I do. We are still on the border of a downfall, but some things have changed and we have a new government. But we don’t know yet what will happen.

 

It is indeed a savage irony at the end that these characters’ financial survival happens because of the downfall of the national economy.

 

For certain groups of investors, it was like this. They don’t bet on the quality of a product or a brand. They “play short”. It’s a term they use: to bet on a downfall. It’s what happened with Greece.

 

Apparently, some politicians were angry and outspoken at the film’s depiction of the region. Were they serious, or did you have to pay them to give you the free publicity?

 

[Laughs] I would have preferred to speak to them about the story, but I was obliged to respond to these miserable wretches who were just looking for a stage to perform on. Of course, the movie is not against the people of the North. That would be weird: I couldn’t make a movie against a population. 

The right-wing political and media attack against the movie happened before anybody had seen it. We are a weird country; we’re always divided and always have been. I’m considered as a left-wing filmmaker who provokes knee-jerk reactions. It is very funny, really, but I wasn’t happy because I’m interested in dealing with serious matters and not stupid things like this. 

 

I understand that the film is to be remade in the US? And perhaps as a miniseries in the UK? And in Korea and India?

 

Nothing is set yet. I can’t say much at this stage. There is interest in a remake from a famous New York production company…

 

Which you will be involved in?

 

Only as a supporter. I will not direct that. They have a very good name in mind as a director. And there is interest from Fox International for a South Korean remake, which is very, very weird to me. 

 

It demonstrates what you discovered, that it’s a universal story.

 

Yes, yes. The story could be set around London, or Paris, or Brussels, or maybe even Melbourne.

On SBS and streaming on SBS On Demand - Barrie Pattison welcomes BLESSED MADNESS (Carlo Verdone, Italy, 2016) and asks for more Verdone please.

Carlo Verdone, Blessed Madness

Carlo Verdone is one of those Italian star comics who occupy a large slice of that nation's cinema without us getting to them because of the subtitle barrier. Like many of his peers and, despite enormous popularity on his home turf, he is kind of peripheral to our experience of the movies. Now seventy, his whole life has been involved with film, growing up in the family of of a pioneer Cinema Academic and graduating from the Centro Sperimentale. He has a bit part in La Luna but we’ll forgive him for that. 

I’ve been on Verdone’s case for forty years now, taking every opportunity to watch him and I have a small pile of his DVDs on my Italian shelf but I still don’t have a clear knowledge of his career or his development. He’s less well defined than Adriano Celantano or his mentor Alberto Sordi.

SBS played a nice ‘scope copy of Verdone’s 2018 Benedetta follia /Blessed Madness, which he directed, in their current cycle of Italian movies. It's now on SBS on demand where it will be for the next couple of months. It is a welcome up-date on his activities, a handsomely filmed Verdone vehicle, where our senior citizen lead suddenly finds himself adrift when wife of decades Lucrezia Lante della Rovere (Quantum of Silence) leaves him for the woman shop assistant from his Catholic Regalia store – jokes about fitting the Cardinal who has put on too much weight for his scarlet robe. We’ve been here before with Pupi Avati’s so nice 2003 Il cuore altrove.

Ilenia Pastorelli, Carlo Verdone, Blessed Madness

Carlo’s filled the store vacancy with a trainee nun but she can’t start for a month. At this point skimpily dressed twenty something Ilenia Pastorelli shows up desperate for work and, when Carlo has to leave the shop for a moment, she impresses him by managing to sell the life size Mother Teresa he’s been trying to shift for years. Ilenia gets to fill the temporary vacancy. 

The formula comic situation asserts with her doing the free spirit thing, embarrassing him with his severe customers and making him question the habits of a lifetime, her connecting him to dating Apps that introduce him to a succession of dingbat prospects that end up with him at the hospital. That’s where he encounters winning nurse Maria Pia Calzone, with whom his efforts to partner are subverted by farcical complications – an auto correcting cell ‘phone that sends a licentious message, gross complications from an  app dinner gone wrong and the calamitous reappearance of the wife. 

"...life-size Mother Theresa..."

It also turns out that Ilenia’s chaotic life is contagious. The biker punk club associates, pursuing her for debts run up by an old flame, intrude into the store where top dollar ecclesiastic paraphernalia is in the showcases. She faces a future of pole dancing, Vergogna again. (we get to see her show stopper performance). When Carlo is wiped out, Ilenia’s party girl friends slip him a smiley face yellow ecstasy pill, triggering a psychedelic Luca Tommassini choreographed dream fantasy, with our hero limbo surrounded by digital dancers. We find that, despite his ultra respectable life style, he still treasures the classic motorbike from his youth and he is reproached about his misery by his de-aged biker self in the mirror. 

Blessed Madness turns out to be an agreeable, original Verdone vehicle. It coasts on the skills of the cast, great production and, believe it or not, charm which is surprising when one of the highlights offers one of our hero's dinner dates getting a vibrating cell ‘phone stuck in her vagina. The surgeon hands it back advising Carlo he has three missed calls. 

A situation where SBS set about filling in the gaps in our knowledge of Carlo Verdone would be welcome. A Cinémathèque where he figured regularly would be even better but let’s not ask for the moon.

Vale Lina Wertmuller (1928-2021)

News has just arrived that Italian director Lina Wertmuller has died. You can read about it here in The Guardian.

Wertmuller was a living force of nature and her films have endured. Cinema Reborn was a partner  with the Italian Cultural Institute in a seriously good and very well received season of Wertmuller's films at the Randwick Ritz earlier this year. Critics, scholars and cinephiles Jane Mills and Blythe Worthy did a whole host of work to get the show on the road, including arranging for speakers at each of the seven sessions.

A number of the introductions were also published on the Film Alert blog and you can find them if you click on these links below

Jane Mills introduces the season

Blythe Worthy introduces THE SEDUCTION OF MIMI

Danielle McGrane introduces ALL SCREWED UP

Bruce Isaacs introduces LOVE AND ANARCHY

Italian Film Festival - Barrie Pattison recommends MI VUOI BENE (Fausto Brizzo, 2019), RITORNO A COCCIA DI MORTO (Antonio Albanese, 2020) and LACCI (Daniele Lucchetti, 2020) ..and harks back to COME UN GATTO IN TANGENZIALE (Antonio Albanese, 2017)

Seems everyone's involved in an unseemly race to get their post lock-up Film Festivals up before Xmas. The Italians are traditionally heavy hitters in this area - like the Spaniards and the Iranians. A few of their celebrities are represented  in the dozen plus new titles on offer - Nanni Moretti, Elio Germani, Danielle Luchetti, Pierfancisco Favino, Fabio Luigi, Stefano Accorsi - too many to do justice. On the other hand we can't help feeling they should try harder with retrospectives than offering Roberto Rossellini, whose work never did stand close scrutiny, and some familiar sixties diva vehicles.

I caught Fausto Brizzi' Si Mi Vuoi Bene in Rome a couple of years back. It was a slick, sentimental comedy in the line of Bisio’s Benvenuti al sud/Nord.  Dissatisfied with his life, bald lead Claudio Bisio spots the storefront Chiacchitere run by Sergio Rubini no less, where people are playing chess and nibbling fresh biscuits. After a night’s consideration, he comes back with a wall chart showing how he plans to put right the lives of his family and friends (vision of characters divided by a gold lightning bolt) setting up his ex wife with store help Dino Abbrescia, claiming to be a fan of Marquez whose name he can’t pronounce, Claudio being the guide on a tourist bus that delivers a load of Japanese to the wife’s “Cera una tempo” book shop to push cameras in her face or taking his lively blonde daughter on a day scaling tree walkway - nice cut to them surrounded by bubbles on the bench where she sat with him as a child.

These plots go wrong of course. His tennis playing dad is set up on a center court where the one time champion has been told to make him look good but dad taunts the man. Turns out the champ is moonlighting with mum too. Bisio’s ladyfriend is outraged and joins him in the Rage Room where she gets so stuck into smashing things that Claudio has to press the red button to get the manager to take away the crowbar she is waving. The brother’s exhibition of his painting of National flags is a bust until (this is dumb) he whacks one over Bisio’s head and a visiting New York critic wants him to do it in an exhibition in the US. The wife gets to appreciate the extra business the Asians represent. 

Good Turin production and strong cast. A few nice gags like Bisio registering shock by flinging the cat he is stroking accross the room. The climax with Rubini is genuinely touching. Si mi vuoi bene is quite endearing and an attempt to break the comedy formulas even if it sometimes doesn’t work and is ultimately soft centred.

Antonio Albanese - no not hat one  - the Italian actor, has been the lead in films by Gianni Amelio (Intrepido 2013) and Pupi Avati (La seconda notte di nozze 2005). Woody Allen made him the traffic cop in To Rome With Love and he’s directed his own movies. We have to regard him as an extension of the line of Italian comedy stars that runs through Toto, Sordi, Tognazzi, Celantano & Verdone. Fausto Brizzi 's 1917 Come un gatto intangenziale/Like a Cat on the Highway with Albanese was his country’s biggest earner for its year, so we hoped to find why this lightweight has proved so popular  but it it never rose above good natured. 

Albanese appeared heading up a big league Rome Think Tank when his teenage daughter Alice Maselli hit him up for twenty Euros and introduced her boy friend from slummy Bastoggi. Things don’t get any better when Antonio follows her bus there and heads off the car from which dark roots and glitter-lettered singleted Paola Bergamasco emerges with a baseball bat to do his wind shield. Passing the “Abandon Hope All Ye who Enter here” wall graffiti he comes to the menacing block of flats where he nervously approaches the top  apartment with the pop music bell push summoning Bergamasco, the boy friend’s mother. 

The film trades on contrasting the two lifestyles.  They get their value out of this with her taken aback by the wall of painted nudes in his tasteful flat and a Bastoggi visit in the company of the daughter's nervous lavender growing mother. He goes on the beach outing to crowded Coccia di Morto (like the Coney Island scene in Devil and Miss Jones) and in return takes them trekking across the fields to the spacious society retreat with the gourmet buffet. We get the arrival of the boy’s slobby dad Luca Amendola with the foil & bleach hair who parts the beach crowd but gets taken away by the cops, or the compulsive shopping twin stepsisters who speak in unison, Alesandra & Guidesaa & Valentina Guidesaa, named Pamela and Sue Ellen after the characters in Dallas.

Off course Albanese's kiss rocks Paola's world and in the end he goes off script and tells his Think Tank that they don’t understand common people like the Coccia di Morto lot. 

That one was quite well made but it traded in the charm of the cast rather than clever gags or strong plotting.

Cast photo, Ritorno a Coccia di Morto

The follow up to Come un gatto in tangenziale - Ritorno a Coccia di Morto  is in this year’s event.  We now get get strident Cortellesi in the nick after the cops found the stolen loot that the twins hid in Paola's flat after their shoplifting outings. Fellow inmates in the domesticated cell tell her to call on “Il Ministro” her influential friend. He’s involved in group selection of the color scheme for the cultural museum he’s setting up but snaps  onto the job, having her transfered to a Catholic institution outside Rome where her nun supervisor keeps popping on organ notes and the aged priest in charge has been replaced by a younger more gung ho cleric expected back from retreat at any minute.

She finds her bed was previously occupied by the fierce looking mother superior who died in it at 103 - the day before. That one figures in Cortellesi’s black and white nightmares.

When the husband of the abused wife sheltered there starts shouting threats Paola headbuts him to the applause of the inmates and nuns. But Paola doesn't fit in all that well when her Milanese community kitchen speciality contains pork that the Muslim parishoners can't eat.

The Rev. Luca Argentero proves to be a better Communist than politician Albanese having tables cleared away after his service to set up the free meal kitchen for the poor. Antonio takes Paola on a cultural tour - the Prosepina statue, a view of the Vatican and their gumboot underground expedition which comes out behind the Trevi fountain. This is nice.

They get back, breaking Paola’s midnight curfew to find father Argentero more concerned with his squatters whose power has been cut off (to the delight of the neighbors). It’s Paola who knows how to rewire the broken connection without breaking the seal, which would be illegal. The cops think she's a passing transvestite looking at the murky security footage. That doesn't go down too well. 

Unfortunately her intervention shuts down all the lights of Rome and the ice sculpture in Antonio's Museum melts leaving a steel  fishbone shape and the floor awash. The comparison between the not unimpressive museum exhibits and the Public Space where they do games, ballet and movies is the smartest thing in this rather blunt satire. When Padre Argentero’s kitchens are condemned by the public health, Paola has him set up there solving that problem rather simplistically.

Back at Cortellesi’s flat the twins rented the rooms to Indian immigrants further impeding Albanese and Cortelesi’s romance. The pair plan on surprising the kids but they have a surprise of their own.

There's nice use of the width of the ‘scope screen. The film passes the time.

Luigi Lo Cascio (centre), Alba Rhrwacher (r), Lacci

It seems hard to believe that I’ve been on Daniele Luchetti’s case for more than thirty years - since I checked out an unknown film from Cannes at the Paris Cinémathèque, that turned out to be the unexpected, likeable Domani accadrà. 

Everything of his I’ve seen has proved to be complex and rewarding but for a lot of his new Lacci, it seemed that Luchetti’s work had plunged into gloom - infidelity, a suicide attempt, people bound together by ties that make them miserable and impact  their children - but if you wait it out the same distanced comic view of life does surface in an even more perverse form than we are used to, one that brings the rest of the film - and real life - into focus.

Alba Rohrwacher and Luigi Lo Casio (great cast in top form here) are raising a young family as he works as a Radio literature commentator in Rome, backed by sound effects men whose antics delight his children. They seem to be absolutely happy as the family join in a dance session and run through the streets in Halloween costume together. 

However out of the blue Lo Casio tells his wife of eight years he’s sleeping with another woman. She turns him out of the house - shot of him pausing downstairs by the car, which we will see again as a locating point in the film’s convoluted time structure.

Understandably he’s on with the delicious Linda Caridi, who his pre-teen daughter secretly adores. There’s a scene of him photographing her naked which proves to be one of the apparently irrelevant incidents that shape the narrative - naming the family cat, the trick unlocking mechanism for the gift box from Poland or the odd way he ties his lacci, shoelaces.

These eventually carry more weight than Rohrwacher’s leap from the second story window from which she’s thrown the radio broadcasting his program or his failure to either create a new family free of ties or sustain the old one.

Flash ahead twenty years and the characters have grown into Laura Morante and grey bearded Luchetti regular Silvio Orlandi who has perfected his serious comic persona. They bicker about his overpaying for Morante’s back massager and suspect the delivery girl of the break-in that las left the flat ransacked and its lifetime of  accumulation in chaos. Orlandi is particularly disturbed over the missing Polish box.

Unexpectedly we pick up with the grown children - and the cat - trying to figure out their lives. Grown daughter Giovanna Mezzogiorno vents. I’ve been on before about the frequency of  the word “vergogna” in Italian films and here we get a major film that pivots on it. It’s introduction into the final dialogues provides the weight to what we have already seen. Mezzogiorno dismisses her mother’s battle to achieve the thing she didn’t really want and her father’s life’s time archiving his insignificant work but the film’s tone is finally not bitter but one of ironic sympathy with characters unable to undo their mistakes, which their children inherit.

The performances dominate though they are showcased by Luchetti’s master craft and his non-judgmental world view. The film seems visually unremarkable but there is control to make the return to familiar images, the single shot of the wheel chair or the glimpses of Rome or Lazio register. Lacci is the director’s most complex and ambitious film, a snap back into his heavy hitter status, a more implacable version of his Anni felice, after the lightweight Momenti di Trascurabile Felicita.