Toni Servillo plays Daniele, a well-known 70-year-old illustrator, now widowed, who lives alone in Milan in Mario Martone’s new film, Trick, screened Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival. The actor reunites with Martone after The King of Laughter and We Believed.

Daniele is the grandfather of five-year-old Mario (Lorenzo Perrotta), who lives in Naples, but they rarely see each other because Daniele is somewhat misanthropic. The boy’s mother, Betta (Serena Rossi), has asked her father to come back to Naples, to the family home, and look after his grandson for a few days while she and her husband (Leonardo Lidi) are away at a conference.

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And so, in the opening sequence, Daniele knocks on the door of the building where he grew up, with no idea of what awaits him: we see a slow tracking shot along the facade of the working-class block of flats in the neighbourhood “behind the station”, set to the elegant piano notes of Valerio Vigliar. Based on the novel of the same name by Domenico Starnone, the film was written by the director together with Ippolita di Majo.

The clash begins right away, as soon as the boy’s quarrelsome parents have left. While Daniele is vain, self-absorbed and gruff, Mario is basically a miniature adult: he's like a talking book, he knows everything, and he's bursting with energy. The grandfather promptly dubs him “fastidious and a know-it-all”. Daniele, who has a past as a famous painter, has to deliver a job to the publishing house he works with: a series of plates to illustrate Henry James’s The Jolly Corner, the 1908 tale and one of the best-known ghost stories by the US-born British writer. Spencer Brydon’s wanderings through the now-empty New York house where he grew up mirror the turmoil engulfing the elderly Neapolitan illustrator.

Settled into the very room where he slept as a child, alongside his brother and grandmother, Daniele sees the ghosts of the past take shape. He tries to draw them, but the creative crisis he’s going through keeps him from using those faceless figures for his plates. And to top it off, he’s struck by a splendid drawing his grandson dashes off almost casually. Amid strolls in a multi-ethnic Naples, misadventures with the building’s caretakers’ son and an accident that could have ended in tragedy (Daniele gets locked out on the balcony, and Mario doesn’t know how to help), the two learn to understand each other, one taking stock of his life, the other peering curiously into what lies ahead.

The director conjures up delightful and often hilarious scenes involving the two of them - retaining the Neapolitan humour that characterises Starnone’s writing - in which you can really tell how much fun the star of The Great Beauty is having. Martone’s film is a modest study of the boundaries of one’s own talent and the salvaging of a lost identity.

Trick was produced by Mad Entertainment together with Rai Cinema, in association with EDI Effetti Digitali Italiani and Picomedia. Its international sales are handled by Rai Cinema International Distribution.