Review: For Lucio Positions Lucio Dalla’s Life As a Pop Tour of Modern Italy

Lucio Dalla’s life and career are the perfect fodder for a traditional documentary. Coming from modest means and looking like no one’s idea of a pop star, the Italian singer spent years struggling to break through with a style considered too experimental, only to eventually become a success and, thanks to covers by the likes of Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli, a cult legend. Add to that the revelation that came to light shortly after his death in 2012 that he had lived as a closeted gay man and you can easily imagine the run-of-the-mill biopic about his life that would steadily march a Hollywood actor to Oscar glory.

Pietro Marcello, though, doesn’t take the well-worn path. Fresh off the success of his breakthrough narrative feature, Martin Eden, the Italian filmmaker approaches the late Dalla’s life in non-linear fashion, as the intimately oriented For Lucio shakes free of the leaden formulas that are widely associated with the artist biopic. Yes, there are interviews, mostly with Dalla’s manager, Umberto “Tobia” Righi, but Marcello employs talking heads less as a means of illuminating Dalla’s life than contextualizing a narrative that the filmmaker pieces together using a mix of archival clips and copious newsreel and film footage. This is a portrait of the artist by way of the society that made him and against which he rebelled.

Attuned to the sociopolitical content of Dalla’s lyrics, Marcello approaches his subject’s career as a kind of pop tour through modern Italian history. Dalla was born in Bologna, whose rapid modernization in the 20th century, from a major agricultural hub to one of Italy’s largest urban areas, was a major theme of his songwriting. Subtly, the film illustrates the esoteric means by which he charted that growth, syncing footage of countryside auto racing to music from the singer’s concept album about cars and how race culture was an attempt to preserve a fading rural culture in Italy. Eventually, the sepia-toned, silent film reels of races give way to colorized, postwar clips of assembly-line workers in an auto factory, the thrill of driving cars replaced by the dull monotony of manufacturing them. Even Dalla’s more cerebral music, like a jazzy epic based on Homer’s Odyssey, exudes a distinctly modern sense of class solidarity, which Marcello teases out by setting it to images of sailors on quays and in pubs.

By capturing so much of Dalla’s musicianship and worldview via such impressionistic means, For Lucio takes the pressure off of interviewees to simply tell the viewer why the musician mattered. This frees up Tobia to reminisce about what kind of person Dalla was as a friend and as a social presence, a viewpoint that’s further elaborated by Marcello upon inviting one of Dalla’s friends, Stefano Bonaga, to speak about the singer, only for Stefano and Tobia to converse with each other about Dalla over dinner instead of addressing the director head-on.

This off-kilter move proves to be a stroke of genius, as the jocular memories exchanged between old friends allows for a richer understanding of Dalla—from his easygoing intellectualism, to his career highs and lows, to the ludicrous figure he cut as a squat, balding, hirsute fellow in the beauty-obsessed world of pop culture—than reams of expository talking-head chatter would have. Stefano and Tobia’s unguarded chat also yields some rather intimate revelations, such as the two men remarking that they and all of Dalla’s friends still refer to him in the present as “his presence goes beyond time, somehow.”

Marcello’s oblique approach allows small moments—such as this relaxed chatter between friends where so much is left unsaid—of direct connection between the audience and Dalla. This extends to the handling of Dalla’s sexuality, which, when it came to light, caused a major re-evaluation of his art and sparked debate about attitudes toward homosexuality in Italy. That’s pretty heavy subject matter that the film succinctly processes by subtly calling attention to the occasional lyric from one of Dalla’s songs that hint at his attraction to men, as if to keep that aspect of his identity as shrouded in death as it was in life. That’s a respectful move, but it, too, speaks to how thoroughly Marcello shakes up one of the most rule-bound genres of nonfiction with one suggestive, poetic impression of a man after another.