When Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful” won an Oscar for best foreign film in 1999, many hoped that his success signaled a renaissance of Italian cinema after years of slump.
It didn’t.
This year not a single Italian film was selected in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival, a rebuff that stirred outrage, despair and passionate hand-wringing here. Yet even in Italy domestic films are in decline, selling only a little more than half as many tickets this year as they did last year. Thirty-five years ago, Italy produced almost 300 films annually. Now, the figure is about 100. One in five doesn’t find a distributor, and many of the others are moved out of theaters after a few days to make way for the latest American blockbuster.
Italians are talking again, as they have been off and on for 30 years, about the “crisis” of cinema, a word usually reserved for falling governments and train strikes.
But there is a slight difference this time. For years film lovers have bemoaned the absence of a new generation of filmmakers who could match the great postwar Italian directors, Fellini, De Sica, Pasolini, Visconti and Rossellini. Yet in a culture where even untested directors are reverently treated as “autori” and given free rein, as well as government loans and grants, filmmakers and critics are beginning to lament the lack of shrewd, tough-minded producers who can discipline screenwriters and coax a commercial hit from a director’s inchoate vision.
The late Franco Cristaldi, a producer who is perhaps best known in the United States as a former husband of Claudia Cardinale, is revered in Italy as a film impresario who, among other things, trimmed Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” by 47 minutes, which helped it win an Oscar for best foreign film in 1990. “It is really sad; there are no Cristaldis today,” said Deborah Young, a film critic for Variety who is based here. Young, a veteran of Italian film festivals, said, “You see the same problems over and over, the lack of script supervision and executive control.”
Tornatore is still making films, but his latest, “Malena,” is being financed and produced by Miramax studios, a business arrangement that may signal the studio’s interest in Italian films but also underlines the absence of strong financial and executive support in Tornatore’s homeland.
Not that the relationship between American producers and Italian directors is always easy. Harvey Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax, recently told Italian reporters that he found Tornatore headstrong and joked that he doubted they would ever work together again. Italian filmmakers once scorned the commercialism of Hollywood movies. Now younger Italians are complaining about the self-indulgent and unbusinesslike style of moviemaking Italian-style.
“Film in Italy is still seen as an art form, not a commercial product,” said Marco Pugini, a young producer whose film company, Panorama, makes international productions. “The market is driven by authors who write their own scripts, and it is hard for the producer to say, `Sorry, the script isn’t working.”‘
Last year the Italian government gave filmmakers $60 million in loans and grants. The handout is less generous than French subsidies, and many film reviewers contend their government should do more.
Producers like Pugini, however, argue that state subsidies are a crutch that helps directors avoid the realities of the market.
Even with government grants, Italian film budgets are small, averaging about $2 million per picture. The result is that Italian film is mostly restricted to two forms: low-budget art films, mostly morose coming-of-age-in-the-provinces tales, and big budget, hugely successful ribald comedies that make “Dumb and Dumber” seem smart.
Christian De Sica, the son of Vittorio De Sica, is the king of the latter genre, an actor and director whose most recent film, “Christmas Holidays 2000,” in which he played his usual role, an antic, hollering husband with a roving eye, was one of the year’s 10 top-grossing films. He is among those who felt affronted by the Cannes Film Festival’s rejection.
“The Cannes decision made me angry,” he said. “As if the French didn’t also make a lot of stupid movies.”
De Sica conceded, however, that Italian cinema was in a slump: “Thank God my films are a big success, but there is a crisis.”
De Sica complained that Italians do not revere their own cinematic history, relying on Americans like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg to restore and preserve the great postwar masterpieces.
The Cecchi Gori Group is one of Italy’s biggest movie companies, an empire that produces or distributes 30 percent of Italian films and owns 70 screens in 45 theaters. It was founded in 1957 by Mario Cecchi Gori, a legendary producer who helped bring “Mediterraneo” to the screen and wrote screenplays. The company is now run by his son Vittorio Cecchi Gori, a senator who, in an echo of the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, combines the movie business with politics and also owns Fiorentina, a Florence soccer team.
Cecchi Gori’s television stations are less profitable than the state channels or Berlusconi’s dominant networks, and the company has run into cash flow trouble, creating payment disputes with MGM and Miramax, though Cecchi Gori said that those “misunderstandings” had been resolved.
Industry insiders do not view Cecchi Gori as the hands-on producer his father was, however. It is his wife, Rita Rusic, from whom Cecchi Gori is now separated, who is credited with producing the films of Leonardo Pieraccioni, silly farces that in Italy have outsold many of Benigni’s most popular comedies.
The company distributed Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful” domestically, and it became Italy’s top money-making film. But Benigni produced the film himself, and worldwide distribution was taken over by Miramax, which insisted on deep cuts in the first half to shape it more to international tastes–and the Oscars.
This year a few Italian films veered from the pattern and did well at the Italian box office, which is dominated by American blockbusters like “Runaway Bride” and “Mission to Mars.” One was “Pane e Tupilani” (“Bread and Tulips”), a slight romantic comedy directed by Silvio Soldini about a housewife who goes to Venice on a lark to escape her dreary life in Pescara. It was rejected by Cannes, but shown there out of competition. Last month it won nine David di Donatello awards, Italy’s version of the Oscars.
Another, “Canone Inverso,” a Cecchi Gori film directed by Ricky Tognazzi, the son of the famous comic actor Ugo Tognazzi, is a more ambitious, international co-production. The film presents a sprawling love story of Czech violinists caught up in World War II.
Neither film can be described as a masterpiece, but the two are viewed by Italian filmmakers as encouraging departures from the usual mediocre fare.
