Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 cinematic trips to take at Italian Film Week, January 7 to 13 at VIFF Centre

The King of Laughter, The Hand of God, and more journey from old Naples to golden-lit Rome

By Janet Smith

The King of Laughter is a lavish Naples-set treat featuring fest spotlight artist Toni Servillo.

The Vancouver International Film Festival, with the support of the Consulate General of Italy in Vancouver and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, presents Vancouver Italian Film Week from January 7 to 13 at VIFF Centre

FIFTH WAVE lockdown has made Vancouver Italian Film Week even more appealing this year, with its chances to escape to sun-dappled seaside Naples, the serpentine canals of Venice, and the golden-lit riverside in Rome.

Alongside the opportunity to watch classics by De Sica and Federico Fellini on the big screen, this year’s lineup also features some dazzling newcomers.

Here are just a few of the more eye-pleasing films worth catching at the VIFF Centre, with COVID regulations in place.

#1

The King of Laughter

Toni Servillo, who’s a focus of this year’s celebration, stars as turn-of-the-last-century comic stage star Eduardo Scarpetta in an impossibly over-the-top-extravagant screen spectacle from director Mario Martone. At Scarpetta’s sprawling Naples home, women pouring out of their corsets lounge on gilded settees, various offspring from wives and mistresses run around, and kitchen staff prepare overflowing platters of octopus and pasta. All the while, canzone napoletana plays on the soundtrack. Some of the best moments come in the theatre, Martone simultaneously catching the action onstage as well as the busy goings-on behind the curtain—most effectively when the beloved Scarpetta knocks on a door from backstage and the camera swings behind him to capture the roaring crowd that greets him when he steps into the spotlight. Family theatrics, burlesque comedy, and atmospheric cobbled streets combine in a film that’s long and larger than life—but an undeniable visual feast.

#2

The Great Beauty

Toni Servillo stars in another beyond-opulent celebration of cinema, this time in an atmospheric Rome, with master filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino bringing a Fellini-esque sense of the strange and carnival-like to the story. Here Servillo is brilliant as the suave, smug, yet bitter Jep Gambardella, a 60s-ish guy still trying to party his way to what he calls “king of the high life”; he’s also an author struggling with boredom and writer’s block. Cinematographically stunning—Rome has rarely looked this magical and surreal—it’s also an acting tour de force, nabbing the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2014.

Björn Andrésen in Death in Venice.

#3

Death in Venice

Director Luchino Visconti opens his 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice with an arrival by steamboat as the sun sets in a pink haze over the Floating City. Set to Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, the intoxicating scene signals that Venice will take a central role in this film about art and beauty. Impressionistic, the deeply unsettling story focuses on Dirk Bogarde’s composer Aschenbach, who becomes infatuated with the adolescent Tadzio—and grows increasingly feverish amid the cholera outbreak ravaging the city. The film is deeply flawed, often criticized for being tedious and hollow (and for causing enormous fallout for one of its stars—see below), but it is so visually sumptuous it will make you, well, long to arrive in Venice by steamboat at sunset, cholera epidemic or not.

#4

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World

It’s simply not possible to watch Death in Venice anymore without pairing it with this haunting documentary about Björn Andrésen, the youth who played the sailor-suited object of desire, Tadzio—a role that ruined his life. A Swede pushed into the movie business by a celebrity-obsessed Granny, he became the original teen idol, mobbed by crowds and exploited by the entertainment industry, then discarded into a tragic adulthood. Perhaps nothing is more disturbing than the audition footage here, a nervous young Andrésen following the demands of a predatory Luchino Visconti and his assistants—innocence crumbling in clear sight of uncaring adults.

#5

The Hand of God

Here’s another, more recent slice of cinematic exuberance from director Paolo Sorrentino, in his memoir about growing up in 1980s Naples. (Watch for a charming Toni Servillo here too). Centering around the teen Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti), it paints a blissful canvas of swimming in the sea and al-fresco meals under vine-covered trellises. Throughout, The Hand of God celebrates family love (though some of the lech-ier touches, like the aunt who loves to sunbathe naked, are eye-rolling). And then Sorrentino cuts through all the beauty with profound autobiographical tragedy—imbuing the film with a strange and indelible feeling of longing for an imaginary paradise that never really existed.

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