Pierfrancesco Favino has a taste for black.
ACAB.
All Cops Are Bastards
and
Suburra
, by Stefano Sollima,
The Traitor
, by Marco Bellocchio, or even
Nostalgia,
by Mario Martone… The Italian star likes to play cops or thugs – he is also “the Lebanese” in Romanzo criminale, by Michele Placido.
“
It turns out that directors think of me when they approach the genre and I'm not complaining about it
,” explained the actor at the time of the release of
Last Night in Milan
, in June 2023.
The thriller questions the border between Good and Evil, morality, ethics.
»
In
Last Night in Milan
, his character, Franco Amore, is an ordinary police officer and a model of integrity.
He roamed the streets of the Lombard capital without ever firing a shot in his thirty-five year career.
His wife, Viviana, prepared a party for him at home with his colleagues and friends.
The party will wait.
In a tunnel, his colleague Dino is found dead.
Amore is called to this crime scene, which he pretends to discover.
Retirement will wait.
The director, Andrea Di Stefano, knows what he owes to his actor.
“
Favino
is the equivalent of Jean Dujardin in France or Javier Bardem in Spain.
He has the same charisma.
» The two men knew each other when the filmmaker was still acting.
It was on the set of The
Prince of Hombourg
, by Marco Belloccchio.
“
Already at the time, Pierfrancesco was a phenomenon,” remembers Di Stefano.
We remained friends and I wrote the screenplay with him in mind.
»
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Brazzaville precious stone mines
Andrea Di Stefano shot her first two films far from Italy.
Paradise Lost, with Benicio Del Toro in the role of drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, a Pathé film produced by Dimitri Rassam, and The Informer, an American production with Rosamund Pike and Clive Owen.
“
The American dream is not really a dream.
To make a film, you have to have a vision, a voice.
In the United States, producers get so involved in everything that eventually your film no longer belongs to you
.
» Favino also toured the United States, under the direction of renowned directors (Spike Lee, Ron Howard, Marc Forster).
And he too came back.
“
I am European and proud of it.
My sensibility is Italian.
I have a very strong feeling of belonging to my culture.
I learned a lot there, but I prefer working in Europe.
I have a lot more freedom
.
»
Last Night in Milan
is a homecoming and an old-fashioned film.
Filmed on 35mm film, with sequences on a real highway and without any digital trickery.
Basket of crabs
While doing research, the director met with agents of the DIA (Direction Investigativa Antimafia).
They explained to him that all the protagonists of Italian crime (Sicily, Calabria) meet in Milan for business.
They don't speak the same dialect, but they have the same interests.
Di Stefano didn't invent this Chinese mafia in Milan either.
It prospers thanks to the trafficking of diamonds extracted from the mines of Brazzaville.
The Chinese bring the stones out under Interpol radars.
Behind the postcard city of fashion and finance, Milan is the hub of illegal and lucrative trafficking.
“
In a city like Milan, earning 1,800 euros per month after thirty-five years of career is ridiculous and it can push you to earn money dangerously,”
says Favino.
Franco Amore is a very different police officer from my CRS character in ACAB.
He doesn't think he's a vigilante.
Their working conditions are different.
They are both poorly paid, but their response to this precariousness is different
.
» In this basket of crabs, Pierfrancesco Favino plays a small fish.
It gives him tremendous charisma and dignity.