14/04/2023 - Rocco Papaleo plays a tense man forced to make peace with his past in his new directorial effort, which is his most personal and melancholy work to date

“A depressive who’s comfortable as such and who wallows in a blissful state of resignation”: this is how 60-year-old piano tuner Orlando Bevilacqua is described to us. We meet him as he’s gearing up for intercourse, without the slightest iota of enthusiasm, with a willing woman. She’s a colleague of his who wears a pink wig and who asks to be called Cleopatra. Then, at the point of climax, his back goes into spasm. Orlando is a solitary and tense man who’s full of rancour and, in order not to feel this rancour, he numbs himself smoking joints. His life is inconsistent and unfulfilled, and his past is a ghost which he needs to make peace with… A session with a good physiotherapist might be the perfect place to start!

Physical and emotional impediments, brotherly love, the Italian South and armed struggles, all form the focus of Scordato, the new film directed by and starring Rocco Papaleo (Basilicata coast to coast [+see also:
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film profile], Una piccola impresa meridionale [+see also:
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film profile]) which was presented in a premiere at the recent Bif&st in Bari and which hit Italian cinemas on 13 April, courtesy of Vision Distribution. The grey day-to-day life of Orlando (Papaleo) is interrupted by a providential meeting with Olga (singer Giorgia in her acting debut), an empathic physiotherapist who doesn’t take long, with her clinical eye, to diagnose our man with emotional immaturity. In order to help him, she asks him to bring her a photo of when he was young to compare his past and present body language. Thus, Orlando is grudgingly forced to return home to the town of his birth (Lauria, in Basilicata) to seek out an old photo, most likely of him in his swimming trunks. It’s an opportunity to travel back in time to the early Eighties when something was shattered forever for him and his family.

On this journey which sees him untangling the knots of his past, Orlando is accompanied by a mysterious boy played by Simone Corbisiero, whom only he can see and who’s also from Lucania; it doesn’t take long for us to realise the latter is actually Orlando as a youth, an exuberant and witty young man with a penchant for poetry. He has a few choice words to say about what Orlando has become, and he pushes his future self hard to react. As the desaturated colours of the present alternate with the warm tones of 1982, we begin to understand, by way of flashbacks, where the protagonist is coming from and the nature of the baggage he brings with him; namely his close relationship with his beloved and cumbersome sister Rosanna (Angela Curri), his mother Giacomina’s (Manola Rotunno) second marriage with hotel owner Rocchino (Jerry Potenza), and the tragic consequences Rosanna’s revolutionary ideology has for all the family, all set in the sleepy South of yesteryear and today, where not even the naming of Matera as the 2019 European Capital of Culture can wake the region from its stubborn stupor.

Ever-present in Papaleo’s films, music hovers over this movie salvifically, offering up metaphors on finding the right chords, notes and harmonies for getting a taste back for life. It’s an existential drama which is also the Lucanian director-actor’s most intimate and melancholy work. This might disappoint those used to the filmmaker’s more comical leanings, but it’s an offering put together with care and it’s spot-on in depicting the effect of the political on the personal.

Scordato is produced by Indiana Production, Less Is More Produzioni and Vision Distribution in collaboration with Sky. Vision Distribution are also handling international sales.

(Translated from Italian)