15/11/2006

"The difficulty of being normal" is how director Maurizio Sciarra sums up his new film, The Kreutzer Sonata – What is Love? (Quale amore) , produced by Lionello Cerri for RAI Cinema and Lumière, in collaboration with the Swiss television operation TSI and Amka Films.

For this new work, Sciarra – who won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2001 for Off to the Revolution in a 2CV – found inspiration from a story by one of 20th century literature's great writers. The film is a liberal adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's story The Kreutzer Sonata, written in 1889.

After two period films (Off to the Revolution was set in the 1970s and the TV film Coppi e la dama bianca: un amore controcorrente was based in the 1950s), Kreutzer is set in the present day, spanning a 13-year arc from 1992 to 2005. Sciarra jokes, "I'd had enough of blocking all the streets to stop cars going past!"

In the original story, the protagonist reveals his past during a three-day train journey through Russia, whereas in this film version Andrea (Giorgio Pasotti) bares his soul while stuck in a snow-bound airport lounge. Tolstoy's rich, upper-middle class nobleman is transformed into a man from the international world of high finance. The story sees Andrea, this successful financier, telling a complete stranger the chain of events that led him to murder his wife, Antonia (Vanessa Incontrada).

Sciarra wrote the screenplay together with Claudio Piersanti, who Sciarra says "gives the film additional weight, though the writing was easy because the original story was so clearly described, with fully-rounded characters," For Sciarra, the characters’ age is important: "Everyone is used to 45-50 year-olds having crises but when you see younger people going through something similar it has a much stronger effect, it's more disturbing".

The cast also stars Arnoldo Foà as Robert, the fellow passenger stranded in the airport with Andrea, and Maria Schneider, best known for her role as Jeanne in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. Here, she plays the part of Maria, "a reassuring presence in the whirlwind of events," though she complains that "not enough people write roles for women over 50. There are parts for older men but not for older women. It's not just a problem in Italian cinema, I live in Paris and it happens there too – I think it's a universal issue". With it's original title named after Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, music obviously plays an important part in Quale Amore. "The music is part of the story, it's one of the characters,” emphasises Sciarra, saying the soundtrack obviously includes Beethoven's famous Sonata itself, as well as other works by the great composer and extracts of Schuman.

Quale Amore is set to be released by 01 Distribution on November 17 in Italy.