"There has never been a poet so adored in life as Gabriele D'Annunzio, loved as a rock star, a genius at 360 degrees and so hated then post mortem. Elsa Morante said he was an imbecile and Pier Paolo Pasolini hated him . And it's a really strange thing because D'Annunzio and Pasolini had something in common, they were both poet-soldiers, ready to get out of the trench and take a blow in the forehead ". So Sergio Castellitto, who played him in Il Cattivo Poeta, a surprising debut work by Gianluca Jodice in cinemas from May 20 with 01 in 200 copies.
An ambitious, philological project and above all that has managed to contain the irrepressible, that is an eclectic character like Gabriele D'Annunzio.
What does the film tell? The autumn of D'Annunzio's life, when the poet preferred the twilight in order not to see his body offended by time. A poet, however, still uncomfortable, unpredictable, "a decayed tooth that is either eradicated or covered with gold" as it is said in the film that tells the last years of the artist-esthete and man of action, when his shadow still frightened fascism.
We are in 1936 and Giovanni Comini (played by Francesco Patanè), the youngest federal in Italy - and this thanks to his mentor, Achille Starace, secretary of the Fascist Party and number two of the regime - is summoned to Rome for a delicate mission: supervise Gabriele D'Annunzio and put him in a position to do no harm.
In fact, Mussolini fears it could damage his imminent alliance with Hitler's Germany. But the Duce did not take into account the charm of the poet, so Comini's political plan will begin to waver and the young federal will find himself torn between loyalty to the Party and admiration for the poet.
IL CATTIVO POETA, produced by Matteo Rovere and Andrea Paris - an Italian-French production Ascent Film and Bathysphere with Rai Cinema - was filmed almost entirely inside the Vittoriale on Lake Garda where D'Annunzio died on 1 March 1938 at the age of 74. In the cast also Tommaso Ragno, Clotilde Courau and Fausto Russo Alesi.
"To get into the character, I cut my hair completely - explains Castellitto - because it is the first image we have of him: a hairless skull full of imagination and poetry. But in the film both the meeting of this artist in the last year of his life with this young man who, unlike him, has more future than past and then the Vittoriale, a place of the soul and archeology of D'Annunzio ".
"Of course there is a lot of ambition in this film, but maybe it's better to have no ambition - he says ironically the director Jodice to his first feature film -. I liked to be this poet imprisoned in the castle of Dracula between women and cocaine.
A Nosferatu species,but in any case an uncomfortable character never inexplicably told by the cinema ".
Finally explains Francesco Patanè, an actor who comes from the theater and perfect, with his ancient face, in interpreting the complex character that really was Giovanni Comini: "I documented myself on the contrary - he says - I tried to forget everything I knew about D 'Annunzio, make a clean sweep. In order to play Comini, however, I referred to what D'Annunzio said to him in the film:' you look like a young man in war who, however, had not fully imagined what war really was'.
(HANDLE).