Leonora Addio (Paolo Taviani, 2022) (Patreon)

This is a film I would have turned off well before the halfway mark, except for the fact that I have a weakness for old school auteurs. Despite it being clear from very early on that Leonora Addio was not a good film, I guess I feel like a master like Taviani has earned the benefit of the doubt. To put it another way: someone asked me at TIFF why I had devoted three hours of my screening day to Come and Go, the final film by João César Monteiro. And the best answer I could muster was, "he went to the trouble to make it. It's the least I can do." 

As it turned out, I quite liked Come and Go. Not so here. For the first ten minutes or so, Leonora Addio shows some promise. It is explicitly a film about death, dedicated to Paolo's late brother / filmmaking partner Vittorio. And at the center of the film is Luigi Pirandello, and the question of how a great artist should be remembered in death. Following the fall of the Fascists, Pirandello's ashes are disinterred from a mausoleum in Rome so they can be laid to rest in Sicily, as per his wishes. This negotiation, with its civic wrangling and bureaucratic complications, had the potential to provide a kind of materialist lesson on history and its sociopolitical uses.

However, Taviani spends a full hour trying to generate some sort of dramatic movement with the traveling and reburying of the ashes. What should have been a brief introductory passage, setting the stage for deeper considerations of literary history, is instead treated like the main event. It is episodic. The Catholic church won't bless his remains in a Greek urn, so the urn has ti be placed in a coffin, but only a child's coffin is available, leading to other miscommunications. But there is simply no interest value in this real-life footnote regarding the Three Burials of Luigi Pirandello. 

Then, in the final half hour, Taviani dramatizes a short story by Pirandello called "The Nail," in which an Italian immigrant boy in 1930s New York randomly murders a young tenement girl. On the one hand, Taviani should have spent most of Leonora Addio bringing Pirandello's writing to life. At least in theory. But "The Nail" is even less engaging than the first hour of the film. The aggressively sepia "New York" Taviani mounted at Cinecittà is interesting, in a curious sort of way. Fidelity-wise, it makes Eyes Wide Shut look like Ken Jacobs. I am not familiar enough with the Taviani brothers' filmography to suggest that Paolo is creatively lost without Vittorio, although a clip from Kaos is much more enticing than anything else in Leonora Addio. An almost complete waste of time.