The Unknown Woman

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