Speciale "Il Postino" 1994 - 2022 (A look inside)
directed by Stefano Veneruso
The documentary on the film Il Postino, entitled Speciale - Il Postino 1994-2022 (A look inside ) is an alternation of images of the protagonists of the film: Massimo Troisi, Philippe Noiret, Renato Scarpa, Linda Moretti, Mariano Rigillo, Maria Grazia Cucinotta, Anna Bonaiuto, but also of all the prestigious technical cast that, usually, is always behind the camera.
Unpublished images that become today, twenty-five years after the death of the great Troisi, and twenty-five years after the release of the film Il Postino, at the Venice Film Festival - 1994, a real treasure to be cherished and to savour every single frame.
As in any documentary it is nice to see the actors in their poses as people even before as interpreters of the parts to be recited. Here we see a fatigued Massimo Troisi, both because of the shooting and his illness. Despite this, his subtle and elegant irony, his composed and pure comedy can emerge, making us forget the human and suffering side of Massimo as a man. Knowing that those were the last hours of the actor’s life, it does nothing but immerse us in a kind of poetry, the same that is celebrated in his latest film, to make the shooting universal and eternal, underlined by a touching music and charged with grandeur, signed by the great Louis Bacalov.
Troisi explains how the making of a film about a text by Antonio Skarmeta, a Chilean writer came about and how the film will not be a story about Chilean history, but a universal love story and why he wanted to make it with Michael Radford, for which, given the success of the film, acts as a launching pad for his career as a director. The dialogues of Massimo Troisi (Mario Ruoppolo) with Philippe Noiret (Pablo Neruda) are both very pleasant and funny, in Italian and French, dialogues that speak of friendship and complicity in the filmic story. A relationship between two people, as Bacalov himself says, between the postman, a person who has few interests and that does not have a life project or goals, and Neruda who explodes the creative and vital side of Mario Ruoppolo.
Roberto Perpignani’s interview, the editor, underlines how the film immediately had an emotional involvement for the story that was going to be told. The key word that emerges from the testimonies given by the screenwriter Anna Pavignano, by the producers Gaetano Daniele and Vittorio Cecchi Gori, is "Poetry" for which inspiration is required, as Neruda tells the Postino.