11/12/2007

"I am to comedy what Springsteen is to rock 'n' roll," jokes the golden boy of Italian cinema Leonardo Pieraccioni during the presentation of his latest endeavour, Una moglie bellissima (“A Very Beautiful Wife”), to be released on 700 screens on Christmas Day by Medusa.

His films are box office record-breakers (the last two, I Love You in All the Languages in the World and Suddenly Paradise, respectively took in €30 and €23m, while Cyclone of 1996 grossed the equivalent of €40m) and Pieraccioni is not at all worried about the holiday competition ("I’m only afraid of the Winx!" he admits).

Produced by Levante with Medusa Film and Sky and shot over nine weeks in a small town near Arezzo, Una moglie bellissima begins where most Pieraccioni films usually end: he and she live happily every after.

This time he (Pieraccioni) and she (the breathtakingly beautiful Laura Torrisi, making her film debut after being a Miss Italia finalist and competing in the 2006 edition of Big Brother) are a happily married couple who sell fruits and vegetables, until fashion photographer Gabriel Garko, struck by her beauty, asks her to pose for a calendar wearing only seasonal fruit (one for each month, naturally).

What distinguishes Pieraccioni’s comedies from those of Boldi and De Sica is the absence of vulgarity and their absolute carefree, light-hearted nature. The comical situations in Una moglie bellissima may be overly light (the actor-director wrote the script with Giovanni Veronesi) but Pieraccioni’s likeability and "Tuscan-ness" will once again hit the box office jackpot.

"It’s a film about forgiveness and the main characters are two heroes who live a simple life in the country," explained Pieraccioni. Torrisi’s greengrocer furthermore is highly reminiscent of Silvana Mangano’s rice weeder in Bitter Rice and Sofia Loren as the pizza maker in The Gold of Naples or the fishmonger of Pane, amore e... fantasia. With their due differences.

(Translated from Italian)