Legendary Alida Valli: in the world of cinema, the adjective that best suits this great actress is this.
We know it in Italy, but they also know it in the world, because this interpreter, born in Pola in Istria once Italian and from there fled with her noble family to Como, has traveled all over the world as muse chosen by immense directors, by Hitchock ( The Paradine case) to Pasolini (Oedipus Re), from Visconti (Senso, perhaps his most famous film) to Reed (The Third Man), and then Soldati, Vadim, Zurlini, Clement, Chabrol in a truly endless list.
A documentary, not surprisingly selected by the Cannes Film Festival among the Cannes Classics of this unfortunate year, tells the legend Valli, as in Hollywood, with the only surname (by art, the real one was Altenburger von Marckenstein und Frauenberg) credits and in the posters.
But not only that: the perspective of the story by Mimmo Verdesca, created with the decisive collaboration of his nephew Pierpaolo De Mejo, gives the viewer, in addition to his brilliant career to be reviewed - he started working at just 15 years old - a private dimension that completes even more the uniqueness of this woman who has crossed the twentieth century.
'Alida', presented at the Rome Film Festival, will debut in theaters with a first event-release on November 16, 17 and 18 distributed by Luce-Cinecittà which produced it with Rai Cinema.
"The meeting with Pierpaolo - he tells ANSA Verdesca - was decisive: Alida Valli kept everything, an immense personal and public historical archive. She was very attached to her family, to her two sons Larry and Carlo, who had been had by the composer Oscar De Mejo married in 1944 during the Hollywood phase of his career, and then to his grandchildren, in particular Pierpaolo.
Leafing through those photo albums, seeing the amateur films it was exciting and from there the idea of paying homage as complete as possible to Alida ".
If the personal archive remained in the family, the public one was donated to the Experimental Center which he had wanted to attend at all costs, in full fascist regime, interpreting the films of Telefoni Bianchi, such as 9 Hours: Chemistry Lesson, but refusing to moving to Salò.
Rebellious, nonconformist, intelligent, witty, Alida Valli was the inspiring muse of directors and of the younger generations, "a modern beauty", as Cannes director Thierry Fremaux says in the film, "a generous interpreter" as Bernardo Bertolucci points out that he wanted it in the twentieth century.
"I grew up with my grandmother - says to ANSA Pierpaolo who in the film is a sort of Virgil in a story that one imagines in the first person of Alida (with the beautiful voice, like hers, of Giovanna Mezzogiorno) - I am happy today to sharing it with others, he was an exceptional person ".
Pierpaolo was the only grandson within range, Larry's four cousins children live in America and he rarely saw them.
"Finally I have the opportunity to remember her properly: my grandmother didn't talk much about her work but together we saw all her films. Why was she unique? First of all because she had suffered a lot, even for love, and then because she was gifted with enormous irony , she was very modern, a thoroughbred as Mario Soldati said about her ".