Orfeo [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Virgilio Villoresi
scheda film], a film adaptation of Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati, offers an alternative interpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a modern setting. It is a film about love, but also about death, desire and the loss of one’s bearings in a surreal world that transforms before the audience's eyes. At the Venice Film Festival, where his movie is showing out of competition, we talked to director Virgilio Villoresi about his influences as well as about his love of ballet, and of vintage and baroque atmospheres.

Cineuropa: What was the biggest challenge you faced in adapting Poem Strip for the screen? What does this cult novel mean to you?
Virgilio Villoresi: The greatest challenge was undoubtedly that of translating into cinematic language a work such as Poem Strip, which was conceived as a highly visionary and evocative graphic novel, yet was also extremely fragmented. Buzzati’s text unfolds through free associations of images, metaphors and often disjointed vignettes, with a structure that is more lyrical than narrative. Together with Alberto Fornari, the film’s co-screenwriter, I spent a long time working on this exact point: finding cinematic coherence and building a narrative framework capable of preserving the expressive freedom of the original work while offering the audience a complete cinematic experience. For me, this novel represented, in a certain sense, the opening of a door into the imagination. I chose it precisely because it offered the opportunity to fully express my imagery and to bring together, in an organic way, all of the techniques I have refined over the years.

Music is extremely prominent in the film; what is your relationship with the soundtrack?
During the making of the film, I repeatedly asked Angelo Trabace to compose the music even before shooting began, so that it would guide me in shaping each scene, its rhythm and its atmosphere. In this way, the music became a living presence, a sort of invisible entity that profoundly influenced my directorial and editing choices. It almost turned into a character of its own – intangible yet central – capable of guiding the audience through the interpretation of emotions.

Classical dance and, above all, the figure of the ballerina, a metaphor for elegance, but also for sacrifice and cruelty, are shown in the film very poetically. What is your relationship with this art form?
The decision to create a female character connected to dance was born of a dual impulse: on one hand, it is a reference to Dino Buzzati’s novel A Love Affair; on the other, it is a strongly autobiographical choice. Since childhood, I have been deeply influenced by the world of dance: my mother was a classical dance teacher, and as a child, I would sit on the floor of the home ballet studio doing my homework while she taught her young students. I can clearly recall the music, the rhythmic counting, her corrections, the gracefulness of the movements: all of this left an indelible mark on me, profoundly shaping my artistic imagination.

I believe that is where my fascination with the harmony of movement, with the musicality of gesture and with the evocative power of the body in a certain space was born. In Orfeo, the representation of ballet is both an homage to this personal memory and intertwined with precise cinematic references. Aesthetically, I was inspired by the cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: films such as The Red Shoes are constantly burning in my visual memory, and it felt natural to try to recreate that same suspended, visionary, hypnotic atmosphere.

The costumes and sets are extremely detailed, baroque and surreal, but also tragic, as in an opera. At times, your film brings to mind Dario Argento, Méliès, Fritz Lang's Metropolis or Loie Fuller. What were your influences, and what atmosphere did you want to create?
You have perfectly captured all of the references. As for the atmospheres, there are multiple influences, both cinematic and visual. In the first part of the film, my imagery was strongly nurtured by the cinema of William Dieterle, which combines mystery, lyricism and a dreamlike dimension. As the movie gradually edges into more surreal territory, the references become more explicitly poetic and symbolic: above all, Jean Cocteau, but also the visionary, mythopoeic work of Maya Deren, which profoundly shaped my sensibility.

At the same time, I have a deep admiration for Italian art and design of the 20th century, for the aesthetic of the period and its refined attention to detail, without forgetting the spectacular influence of Busby Berkeley’s choreographed films – he was capable of turning every element into part of a visual symphony. I must also admit that this attention to objects and atmosphere stems from a personal inclination: I am a collector of vintage objects, and this passion inevitably influenced the style and aesthetic choices for the film.