Leonora Addio Review: Paolo Taviani’s Patchy Tribute to His Brother and Italy’s Past

Any nonagenarian European likely has some stories that would make most of their American contemporaries’ encounters with the course of history seem tame by comparison. The 91-year-old Paolo Taviani’s ambitious new film Leonora Addio attempts to sum up the history of cinema and of the 20th century as a whole from an Italian perspective. And given that much of the narrative takes place during the U.S. occupation of Italy in the aftermath of WWII, Taviani gets some digs in at the Americans while he’s at it.

Leonora Addio is ostensibly an homage to Luigi Pirandello, a figure not at all forgotten but probably not loved with the same intensity by those born in midcentury as by those born before it. The mass adoration bestowed on the author, the way people wrapped him into their images of both nation and self, is one major theme of this tangent-prone film. A scene in the middle of Leonora Addio shows eager Sicilian students crowding around a church window to catch a glimpse of the man’s ashes, a decade after his death. Inside, the priest is in the midst of reluctantly admitting how much he liked Pirandello’s less-than-God-fearing novels.

While Pirandello and Italy’s healing from the trauma of war and occupation are subjects here, you don’t have to dig very deep to find Taviani’s older brother Vittorio in the subtext. Paolo dedicates Leonora Addio to the elder Taviani, with whom he made all of his previous work, and who died at the age of 88 in 2018. The film’s rumination on the difficult, existential truth that the world continues after each of us dies—and that even a great artist can’t control the course of their memorialization—reverberates with the recent details of Taviani’s biography.

Leonora Addio, then, wrestles with memory and history through a deeply personal, if at times indulgent, lens. The film’s plot, when it gets rolling after a protracted but moving prologue recounting Pirandello’s 1934 death, concerns the efforts of one of the author’s aged sons (Fabrizio Ferracane) to transport his ashes from Rome to Sicily. His journey through postwar Italy is less filled with incident than it is with tangents. These moments are more successful when they’re lightly comic (as in the priest’s hand-wringing over Pirandello’s morality) than when they reach for poetic allegory (as in an extraneous scene where a former Italian POW makes love to his German bride on board a train, symbolizing national healing).

Taviani goes about telling the story of Pirandello’s protracted reinternment with an older man’s casual irreverence for our expectations, particularly regarding style and structure. The time between the author’s first and second burials is conveyed by a montage of neorealist films, including Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan, and Paolo Carnera and Simone Zampagni’s lush, black-and-white cinematography successfully imitates the look of such classics of Italian cinema. At a certain point, Ferracane’s character simply disappears from the reinternment plot, which is then wrapped up without fanfare in favor of an extended adaptation of Pirandello’s late, America-set short story “The Nail,” in full, vibrant color.

Some elements unite the black-and-white historical stretch of Leonora Addio with the fictional finale. For one, the adaptation of “The Nail” helps to frame the overall film as a critique of the “American century,” as its stagy, Brechtian depiction of the squalid living conditions of turn-of-the-century Italians immigrants in the U.S. links up with the earlier section’s depiction of Italy’s U.S. occupiers as hubristic, self-centered Anglo-Saxons. Otherwise, though, the juxtaposition between the account of Pirandello’s reinternment and an adaptation of a story that he wrote has an air of arbitrariness to it.

Leonora Addio’s freewheeling structure ties in with the film’s overarching theme that life inevitably feels unfinished, but many of Taviani’s vignettes are underdeveloped and fail to resonate with one another. Perhaps the feeling of arbitrariness is to some extent intentional, but overall, the looseness of the whole gives an impression of incompleteness. Rather than an existential query, sometimes Leonora Addio feels more like an unfinished sketch.