Mario Martone is surely the busiest director in Italy. Last May, he was in Cannes with his latest dramatic feature, the evocative Naples-set drama Nostalgia (later chosen as Italy’s Oscar contender). He came to the festival in breaks between rehearsals for a production of Rigoletto that he was then staging at the Scala Opera House in Milan.
This week, he has been in Berlin with his feature documentary Somebody Down There Likes Me, in breaks between his latest stage production, this time of ‘Romeo And Juliet,’ which is being put on at Milan’s Piccolo Theatre with a very young cast. (His Juliet, he confides, is only 15).
“Really I don’t know,” Martone sighs wearily when asked how he finds the time to direct dramas, operas and documentaries one after the other in such rapid succession – and to attend movie festivals in the middle of the rehearsals for his new projects. “I am here but I am not here with my mind.”
The documentary (which screened as a Berlinale Special) profiles the legendary Italian actor, comedian and director, Massimo Troisi. Born 70 years ago, in 1953, Troisi died in 1994, aged only 41, just after appearing in Michael Radfords’s Il Postino. (His performance secured him an Oscar nomination).
Martone is six years younger than Troisi. He too is from Naples. When Martone shot his first movie, Troisi saw it and told the younger man how much he admired it.
“I didn’t imagine he would be interested in my films because they were very different from his films. I was very surprised when I realised he understood several very precise aspects of my films. He wanted to talk with me about this – just the two of us,” Martone recalls.
Troisi was a much loved comedian. Martone believes that audiences were so busy laughing at his antics and romantic misadventures that they didn’t always pay attention to his skills as a film director.
“The public didn’t even ask the question [about whether he was a good director]. They just went to see his films because they loved him,” Martone notes. “[But] what was strange was that Italian critics didn’t rate him enough as a film director because at that time there were the so-called ‘new comedians.’” He reels off their names: Benigni, Verdone, Moretti. “They [the critics] were putting all these new comedians in the melting pot and they didn’t appreciate him [Troisi] as a director.”
Troisi’s films as a director, such as I Start Over From Three and The Ways Of The Lord Are Over are now very highly regarded.
Some reviewers see the characters Troisi portrayed on screen as Italian equivalents to François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, the figure based on Truffaut who featured in the French New Wave director’s autobiographical films from The 400 Blowsto Love On The Run and Stolen Kisses.
In his youth, Troisi endured acute heart problems which caused him intense physical pain. As the documentary reveals, he recorded his suffering in frank but stoical fashion in his notebooks. He recovered, though. By the time Martone knew him, Troisi was playing football, having fun in the evening with his friends and pursuing beautiful women. “He had a full and intense life.”
When he began work on Il Postino, his health was good – but then it deteriorated rapidly. He was to have a fatal heart attack very shortly after completing work on the film.
“Between these two crises, the first surgery and his death, he had very healthy full years,” Martone points out. “The only thing was that when you were alone in a room with him you could hear the noise that was made by the machine he had attached to his heart!”
As for the documentary genre, Martone regards the form as being as rewarding in its own ways as fictional storytelling. This isn’t his first doc. Thirty years ago, he made a film about Neapolitan art curator and entrepreneur, Lucio Amelio.
“Very often in my fictional films, you see documentary elements,” the director adds. For example, in his drama Nostalgia, he recruited many of the local people from the catacomb-like Sanita neighbourhood of Naples, where the film is set.
Troisi, too, was a proud Neapolitan. Martone regards him as a pioneer when it came to filmmaking in the city. All those other great directors from Naples, Capuano, Sorrentino and Martone himself among them, owe him a debt.
“We are all very different but we all shared the idea we wanted to look at Naples in a different way, far away from the traditional [representations] in cinema. We all loved Troisi because of this.”
Somebody Down There Like Me is produced through Indiana Production, Vision Distribution and Medusa Film and was made in collaboration with Sky. The documentary was made to mark the 70th anniversary of its subject’s birth.
It may now be 30 years since his sad and untimely death but the comedian remains a familiar figure and has plenty of new, younger fans. They delight in his funniest clips on social media platforms like Tik Tok. “They know [only] fragments of his work but they are very, very widespread and very, very popular.
Martone hopes his documentary will encourage these viewers to investigate Troisi’s life and work a little more deeply.
