06/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Francesca Comencini tells the story of her special relationship with her father Luigi, master of Italian cinema, at the most difficult moment of her life

Fabrizio Gifuni and Romana Maggiora Vergano in The Time It Takes

With Mario Monicelli and Dino Risi, Luigi Comencini (1916-2007) brought a twist to Italian comedy of the 1970s. The director of the successful diptych Bread, Love and Dreams and Bread, Love and Jealousy, both starring Vittorio De Sica and Gina Lollobrigida, he is mostly remembered for the 1972 TV miniseries The Adventures of Pinocchio, also distributed in a cinema version. On the set of Pinocchio, in the provinces north of Rome, a little girl was freely running around – Francesca, one of the firector’s four children, who later became a filmmaker herself, like her big sister Cristina Comencini. Francesca Comencini has dedicated The Time It Takes [+see also:
interview: Francesca Comencini
film profile], projected Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival, to her relationship with her father.

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“First life, then cinema” are the words that Luigi speaks to Francesca on the set of Pinocchio, a sentence that is a little like the soul of the film and an omen of the dramatic moments to come that they will have to face together, as father and daughter, sealing a very strong relationship. With modesty but great courage, Francesca talks about a pivotal moment in her life, between adolescence and adulthood. We are in 1969, the images of the Piazza Fontana massacre, the episode that inaugurated the long season of terrorism, are on TV; Francesca isn’t even 10 years old and her father, played by Fabrizio Gifuni, browses with her the book illustrated by Collodi with the adventures of the famous puppet. The story tells us that Comencini had been working on the idea for years and the filmmaker shows us a moment in the creative process of a great craftsman of cinema. We are then thrown onto the chaotic set, where Luigi seems like a lion tamer in a circus. Later, high school student Francesca (played by Romana Maggiora Vergano, whom we discovered in There Is Still Tomorrow [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]), a sympathiser of the radical left, is in full conflict with her father. Heroin is spreading in Rome and our protagonist also gives in to drugs, and is no longer able to hide it from a helpless father who had put his trust in his daughter. A boy that Francesca dates dies of an overdose and, desperate, she throws herself onto the coffin at the funeral. To save his daughter’s life, Luigi decides to ignore all his cinematic projects and to leave for Paris with her, where Francesca, carefully watched over by her father, will slowly and painfully take the path of detoxification. At Luigi’s first Parkinson’s symptoms, the roles are reversed, and it is she who takes care of her father.

When Francesca makes her first film - “about my complicated years”, she says - her father smiles: “I’ve made 40 films without ever talking about myself and you have the courage to make your first film about your own life”. We see her here, in Venice, receiving the De Sica Award at the festival. With a distance of 40 years from this debut, titled Pianoforte, Francesca has looked back on those memories but above all, she has definitely come to terms with the man in front of whom she never felt good enough, with whom she was incapable of communicating. A father who told her about vocation when she was scared of failure, but who then will reawaken passion in her. Francesca Comencini has shot this story excluding every other family member from cinematic representation (neither her mother nor her sisters appear in the film) and in a certain way, also describing the passing of the baton from a cinema born from neorealism to a generational cinema-mirror.

The Time It Takes is a co-production between Italy and France by Kavac Film, Les Films du Worso, IBC Movie and One Art with Rai Cinema. The film will be released in Italian theatres on 26 September with 01 Distribution. International sales are handled by Paris outfit Charades.

(Translated from Italian)

Photogallery 06/09/2024: Venice 2024 - Il tempo che ci vuole

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Francesca Comencini, Fabrizio Gifuni, Romana Maggiora Vergano
© 2024 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it