Oscar-winner film-maker Roberto Benigni could do little wrong in his Italian homeland, but his Pinocchio has put several noses out of joint. Philip Willan reports.
Robert Benigni's Pinocchio has been smashing box-office records since its release in Italy last week. That's hardly surprising: the 19th century fable by Carlo Collodi about a wooden puppet whose nose grows every time he tells a lie is an essential part of every Italian childhood. And the most expensive film in Italian history, which bears a €44.1 million price tag, opened at a record 940 of the country's 3,000 cinema screens with a massive publicity push.
Having conquered Hollywood with his triple Oscar-winning Holocaust tragi-comedy, Life Is Beautiful, the Tuscan actor/director has imported some of the marketing wiles of Tinseltown for use in Italy. A variety of books associated with the production are piled high in bookstores and the film is being promoted through McDonald's outlets.
Benigni started by imposing secrecy clauses on all actors and extras frequenting his set, located in the same converted chemicals plant near Terni where Life Is Beautiful was shot. Collodi's story has been known since the early 1880s, but the Benigniesque twists to it were to be kept a surprise.
The production has been a family affair. Benigni directs and plays the title role, while his wife, Nicoletta Braschi, produces and co-stars as the Blue Fairy. And one of the couple's companies manages the film studio. Having sunk a lot of his Oscar profits into the production, Benigni is clearly keen to avoid making the same mistake as Pinocchio, who is persuaded to bury his gold coins in a magic field in the hope they will grow. Instead, they are dug up and stolen by an evil Cat and Fox while his back is turned.
To avoid that happening, Benigni and his US distributor, Miramax, have been keeping a tight hold on the product. Foreign journalists were prevented from attending the initial press screening, and when Benigni visited Bologna University to collect an honorary degree, the right to record images of the event was reserved for his own production company, Melampo Cinemato-grafica. Photographers were so irritated by the restrictions they sent in just one of their number to take one photograph, which was released with Benigni's face blanked out.
Producing, directing and starring in a Hollywood-style blockbuster, the success of which would confirm his millionaire status, presents considerable image problems for a man of left-wing sympathies who began as a stand-up comic. The decision to distribute the film in Italy through Medusa and to sell the Italian TV rights to Mediaset has not been without controversy. Both companies are owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, a frequent butt of Benigni's jokes. "I don't want to speak well of Berlusconi behind his back," Benigni said at one of his public appearances to present the film.
Berlusconi might not match Count Camillo Benso di Cavour - one of the founding fathers of modern Italy - for statesmanship, he said, but he was still a fine businessman.
Benigni's dilemma was outlined in a front page article in La Stampa under the headline "Benigni Ltd". "Pinocchio has removed him from the realm of the artisan and placed him firmly in the system," the paper wrote. "Rather than the film, the talk today is of the commercial ideas dreamed up by Roberto the Cat and Nicoletta the Fox [his wife]to squeeze out gold coins."
A champion remains a champion even when he is stinking rich, the paper concluded, but it becomes a bit more difficult to continue to consider him a symbol of resistance to a regime under which he seems to be doing very nicely.
Critical reaction to the film has also been lukewarm. Some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece and praised its straightforward adaptation of the original text. Others have expressed disappointment at its lack of contemporary satirical references and at the apparent compression of Benigni's natural ebullience.
Having dared to mix comedy with the horror of the Holocaust, Benigni seems to have been intimidated by the scale of his new reponsibilities and to have opted for a minimum of artistic risk.
The Rome daily, Il Messaggero, reported on the press preview under the headline "Pinocchio disappoints the critics". In the fable of the wooden puppet who has difficulty in growing into a real boy, Benigni fails to choose between the astonsihment of being a child and the horror of becoming an adult, opting cautiously for a middle road, the paper said. "And the film, with all its personalities and effects, never takes flight."
The paper's city rival, La Repubblica, also reflected on the film's strange failure to inspire. "The enthusiasm, the culture, the passion, the money, the sensibility, the talent: everything was there to make it a masterpiece. But to be one, strangely, this Pinocchio needs something more, one doesn't know what, perhaps that imponderable, unclassifiable, involuntary and mysterious light that is called magic," the paper wrote.
For one unsatisfied viewer, the only truly comic scene was the one in which a pair of donkey's ears sprout from the heads of Pinocchio and his friend, Lucignolo. The production has even been attacked by one of its own actors, miffed that his scenes had been cut to leave more space for Benigni. Carlo Giuffre, who plays the role of Geppetto, the carpenter who brings Pinocchio to life, complained to the Naples daily, Il Mattino, that the cuts destroyed his painstakingly crafted character. "I wish the film every fortune. May you win 10 Oscars, Roberto, but my disappointment will not diminish."
There have been many attempts to adapt Collodi's fairy tale for the screen, but for scale and ambition Benigni's, for all its shortcomings, is the only one likely to match the animated version produced by Walt Disney in 1940. Italian children appear to be satisfied at the faithful rendering of the literary classic, even if some of their parents may miss the irreverence and scandal normally associated with the Tuscan comic.
Those qualities have been somewhat stifled in this version of the pinewood puppet. Poetic invention is not missing, but the acting of the two protagonists is at times, well, wooden - perhaps to be expected from Pinocchio, but not what one wants from the Blue Fairy. - (Guardian Service)
Pinocchio opens on December 26th