Italian Real Estate Property News & Events
2010-03-08
With Turturro, Italy knows No Bounds
(“Italian Folk Tales”), a powerfully imagined parable he also directs and has freely adapted from fables collected by Italo Calvino, Giambattista Basile and Giuseppe Pitrè. Mr. Turturro studies a fool (Max Casella) who has just arrived at the inn with a magical donkey. The fool asks him to give the beast food and fresh water and cautions him not to say “ass dump” in its presence. Though the innkeeper instructs his wife not to utter the phrase, she blurts it out anyway, causing the donkey to bray, raise its tail and shower the ground with jewels. While upbraiding her for repeating the incantation, the innkeeper repeats it himself. Which prompts a second cascade. “O.K., everyone!” says the fool, at which point he invokes the magical words. Presto: Another shimmering load. The donkey dung scene derives from Basile’s “Racconto dell’Orco” and “Ari-ari, Ciuco Mio, Butta Danari!,” No. 127 of the 200 yarns in Calvino’s popular folklore anthology, published in 1956. In the book’s introduction, Calvino quotes a Tuscan proverb: “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.” Mr. Turturro, a veteran of dozens of Off Broadway plays and scores of Hollywood movies, added elements that would not be out of place in commedia dell’arte, the ancient Italian improv theater. His production, which last month concluded a sold-out tour of Turin, Naples and Milan, featured minstrels, two overlapping stories, layers of language (English, Italian, Western Lombardian, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Piedmontese, Abruzzese) and characters blissfully free of self-consciousness. Bathed in a palette of unlikely yet sumptuous color combinations, ogresses posed as lovely maidens, ghouls vanished into enchanted sacks, and princes sprang from giant talking crabs. As often happens in tales of transformation, power is eventually tempered with responsibility, and the cruel realities of existence cede to purity, virtue and rectitude. “Calvino said that folk tales are a general representation of life,” Mr. Turturro, 53, said over plates of osso bucco and risotto Milanese at a trattoria near the Duomo. “I find the economy and beauty of these stories quite irresistible. They’re full of grace and humility and reflect an Italy without borders, an Italy more of a continent.” Like one of Mr. Turturro’s favorite films, Vittorio De Sica’s neo-Realist fairy tale “Miracle in Milan” (1951), the stories wed fantasy to the everyday. “They’re the naïve tales of peasants trying to make sense of their lives,” he said. “They attempt to give hope to those who have none.” And despite their age, the fables remain remarkably fresh. “Bernie Madoff — greedy, irresponsible, only out for himself — is an echo of some of the tricksters and deceivers,” he said. Mr. Turturro grows lyrical discussing the “continuous quiver of love” that runs through the stories. He loves Italy with a passion that perhaps only the children of immigrants are capable of. “Many great Italian authors have never even been translated into English,” he lamented. “In the United States being of Italian descent is not a broadening experience. It’s narrowing, in that you’re rarely exposed to the depth and diversity of Italian culture. American culture is so flattened. I’m not so interested in being made into a pancake anymore.” He is interested in having his production of “Italian Folk Tales” restaged in a New York theater, however. “It would be nice to present this aspect of Italy that isn’t seen very often in the states,” he said. The play is just the latest expedition in Mr. Turturro’s midlife exploration of his ancestral land. The journey began in 1986 during the filming of “The Sicilian,” Michael Cimino’s murky meditation on the life of the notorious outlaw Salvatore Giuliano. “I had studied Italian for three months,” Mr. Turturro recalled, “and when I got to Sicily, I was completely lost.” A half century ago Mr. Giuliano was the subject of a groundbreaking piece of political filmmaking by Francesco Rosi, the acclaimed Neapolitan director. Mr. Rosi was so taken by Mr. Turturro’s turn as a throttled playwright in the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink” (1991) that he asked him to play the lead in “La Tregua” (“The Truce”). “The film is ironic and grotesque,” Mr. Rosi told him, “and I feel you have both.” Six years in the making, “La Tregua” was based on Primo Levi’s account of his postwar odyssey back to Turin from Auschwitz. Mr. Rosi, in turn, gave Mr. Turturro a translation of Eduardo De Filippo’s sentimental comedy “Questi Fantasmi.” In 2005 Mr. Turturro brought the play — retitled “Souls of Naples” and directed by Roman Paska — to New York and Naples. He has since written a screenplay and is on track to direct and act in an English-language feature, which is being produced by Domenico Procacci, who also produced “Gomorrah.”
