A Pure Formality

Una pura formalità

France, Italy

1994

108 Min

Color

2.35:1

French

Currently 3.7/5 Stars.
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PROD Mario Cecchi Gori, Vittorio Cecchi Gori

CAST Gérard Depardieu, Roman Polanski, Sergio Rubini, Nicola Di Pinto

MUSIC Ennio Morricone

Cannes (In Competition), Stockholm (Open Zone), Sundance

Synopsis

Murder mystery meets spiritual allegory in A Pure Formality, an appealingly cerebral psychodrama by gifted Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Tornatore. Set in a forlorn and soggy corner of France, this intense and talky puzzler seems a far cry from Tornatore’s sunny and lyrical Sicilian films, ;Everybody’s Fine; and Cinema Paradiso. Yet when all is said and done, it isn’t so surprising that he’s the maestro behind this curtain.

Despite this French-language film’s dire mood and cloudy palette, Tornatore clings to the sentimentality that characterized his previous efforts. It’s a while before the sky brightens and the story, something of a shaggy dog tale, heads off in an altogether heavenly direction.

Principally a two-man show, the film takes place inside a leaky provincial police station on a dark and stormy night. The phones are down, the power is out, and a dogged police inspector (Roman Polanski) attempts to cajole a confession out of a muddy murder suspect (Gerard Depardieu), who was discovered running through the woods in the heavy rains.

Outraged to find himself held against his will, the suspect claims to be the famous novelist Onoff and threatens the police officer with repercussions from his friends in high places. The inspector, an Onoff fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of his works, finds the claim outrageous. Like Salieri in “Amadeus,” he cannot believe so coarse a creature capable of art so sublime.

Thus the inspector spends half the night trying to establish the suspect’s true identity—a task complicated by the alleged novelist’s selective amnesia and his tendency to change his story. Onoff, a master storyteller, makes up several versions of this autobiography and, as the candles gutter, it seems that he is actually gaining some ground in this game. But the inspector has his methods, some of them rather unpleasant.

The petite Polanski and the hulking Depardieu are an evenly matched and engaging pair of duelists, though the match does go on a bit too long. Ultimately, there is enormous irony in Polanski’s true role here, but then few of us really are what we seem to be in this masquerade called life. And that is precisely Tornatore’s point. — Washington Post

Director

Giuseppe Tornatore

After staging two plays by Pirandello and De Filippo with an amateur dramatics company at just sixteen years of age, Tornatore took his first tentative steps in the world of cinema through documentaries (one of these, “Ethnic minorities in Sicily (Le minoranze etniche in Sicilia)”, won him an award at the Salerno film festival) and television work (for RAI he produced “Portrait of a thief (Ritratto di rapinatore)”, “Guttuso’s diary (Diario di Guttuso)”, “Sicilian writers and films: Giovanni Verga, Luigi Pirandello, Vitaliano Brancati, Leonardo Sciascia (Scrittori siciliani e cinema: Verga, Pirandello, Brancati, Sciascia”). In 1984 he was second unit director on “Cento giorni a Palermo” by Giuseppe Ferrara and, two years later, finally made his directorial debut: “The professor (Il camorrista)” (1986), a hard-hitting portrait of a Naples underworld boss, is a sturdy, inspired work that successfully combines political considerations and spectacular scenes. Nonetheless, it was with his next film that the young filmmaker was to attain success and recognition, thanks also to the superb insight of producer Franco Cristaldi: “Nuovo cinema paradiso” (1998), which went on to take the special jury prize at the Cannes film festival and the Academy Award for best foreign picture in 1990, is a film of bitter-sweet recollections set in a small Sicilian town in the ‘50s. It pays an emotional tribute to the world that cinema once was, complete with kiss scenes edited out by the parish priest, movie theatres with wooden chairs and clouds of cigarette smoke. Tornatore strived to build on its success, but disappointed with “Everybody’s fine (Stanno tutti bene)” (1990), the tale of a pensioner who travels the length of Italy to visit his children, which is both moralistic and clichéd. Things went better with the subsequent “A pure formality (Una pura formalità)” (1994), a psychological thriller with a metaphysical vein, bolstered by sensitive performances from Gerard Depardieu and Roman Polanski. After the rather unconvincing “The blue dog (Il cane blu)”, a segment in the botched “Especially on Sunday (La domenica specialmente)” (1991), the subsequent “The starmaker (L’uomo delle stelle)” (1995) heralded a return to that Sicily of bygone days, where in the immediate post-war period a confidence trickster organizes bogus cinema screen tests upon payment, cheating poor villagers out of the little money they have. Sergio Castellitto is sufficiently good as the leading man, but the film is disjointed. Audiences did not seem overly enthusiastic, thus Tornatore decided to raise the stakes with a big-budget epic: “The legend of 1900 (La leggenda del pianista sull’Oceano)” (1998) adapts the Alessandro Bariccio monologue “Novecento” in a rather pompous manner, and the resulting film leaves more than a few perplexities in its wake. “Malèna” (2000) is another film set in Sicily, this time in 1940: it tells of a young boy’s erotic obsession with an older, recently widowed woman, and is good in parts, but does not succeed in doing what Tornatore almost certainly set out to do – portray an entire era and mentality. —italica.rai.it

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Giulia Di.

31Oct11

Grande ripresa verso la fine.

Stardust Memory

12Oct11

I just watched this movie the other night and I was very impressed. The ongoing rain, the dialogues, the actors (like Gérard Depardieu and of course Roman Polanski), the story itself - especially the end, that I really didn't expect - formed an amazing atmosphere. All this and above all the denouement of the story made this movie one of the best I've seen in a long time.

hauken likes this

COOL CAT

28Aug11

In my humble opinion this is one of the best, although mostly not understood nor appreciated, movies ever made. In fact, it's more like a play than a movie or merge of first-class theater with excellent film making. Perfect dialogues, impeccable script with a sudden revelation at the end, haunting music make me to watch this movie again and again, and each time I discover something new in it.

hauken likes this

Adriano Rocha

25Aug11

Sim, ontem eu revi "Uma Simples Formalidade" (sei que minha amiga Toddy Delahov adora). Uma obra-prima, de 1994, dirigida por Giuseppe Tornatore, e com as atuações vigorosas de Gérard Depardieau e Roman Polanski. O filme prende o espectador num fio de suspense; não te como não sentir um grande prazer conferindo essa obra. Simples, direto, bem finalizado. Perfeito!