THE WALTER READE THEATER

  Our Man of the Hour: Sergio Castellitto

January 28 - February 8, 2005

left: MY MOTHER'S SMILE

Presented by AIP-Filmitalia and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of New York. The series was organized by Antonio Monda, Richard Peña and Griselda Guerrasio.

With four films slated for release within the first half of 2005, Sergio Castellitto seems well on his way to becoming one of the most popular Italian actors for international audiences since the heady days of Mastroianni and Gassman. Born in Rome in 1953, Castellitto became active in the theater while in his twenties, working with some of Italy's finest stage directors. In the 80s he began appearing regularly in films, and by the 90s had graduated to leading roles for directors such as Marco Ferreri (La Carne), Francesca Archibugi (THE GREAT PUMPKIN), and Giuseppe Tornatore (THE STAR MAKER). But it was with a French film, Jacques Rivette's Va savoir, that Castellitto really attracted international acclaim. Playing Ugo, the artistic director of an Italian theater troupe visiting Paris, Castellitto brilliantly captured a certain kind of contemporary artist/intellectual, a man simultaneously completely self-centered and painfully aware of just how self-centered he is. Indeed, it's his very "contemporary" quality that makes Castellitto such an appealing figure. There's a wonderful sense of irony, a kind of world-weariness belonging to someone who thought he had seen everything. One can see this in his growing bafflement in My Mother's Smile, as he gets caught up in a plot he no longer thought was possible; or in his reaction to discovering the chummy relations between talk show superstars of the political Left and Right in CATERINA IN THE BIG CITY. Castellitto isn't an "everyman," but there's something that assures us that we know someone just like him. Besides acting, Sergio Castellitto has also tried his hand at directing, and his second film, DON'T MOVE, co-starring Penelope Cruz, was one of the great critical and commercial successes in Italy last year. - Richard Peña

THE GREAT PUMPKIN / IL GRANDE COCOMERO
Francesca Archibugi, Italy, 1993; 95m
In Francesca Archibugi's best film, Sergio Castellitto plays Arturo, a passionate psychiatrist who establishes an intense relationship with a young patient named Valentina (Alessia Fugardi). For many years, the girl has been treated as an epileptic. However, from the moment she enters the clinic where he works, Arturo becomes aware that her case is far more complex, and decides to focus his therapy more on her family life than on drugs. A great performance by Castellitto, who shows the tormented humanity of a decent doctor who puts all of his dedication into caring for his patients despite the ludicrous inefficiencies of Public Health Services. Laura Betti cameos in one of her last screen appearances.
Fri Jan 28: 1:30; Wed Feb 2: 5; Tue Feb 8: 6:15

THE STAR MAKER / L'UOMO DELLE STELLE
Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy, 1995; 113m
One of Sergio Castellitto's richest and most ambiguous roles to date: Joe Moretti is a conman who calls himself Dottore (the title for anyone who is a university graduate in Italy, but also who is a player in the movie industry) and travels around Sicily doing fake screen tests for the "Italian branch of Universal Studios." He takes money or sexual favors for his efforts until he meets Beata, an illiterate convent girl who desperately wants to change her life. Beata falls for him, but Joe realizes his feelings for her too late. Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, THE STAR MAKER is a much darker, and in ways more deeply felt, meditation on the power of the movies than the director's much loved Cinema Paradiso. Nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1996.
Fri Jan 28: 3:45; Sat Jan 29: 9:15
Tue Feb 1: 2 & 8:30

DON'T MOVE / NON TI MUOVERE
Sergio Castellitto, Italy, 2004; 125m
Based on the bestseller by Margaret Mazzantini, winner of the Premio Strega literary award and soon to be published in the United States by Nan Talese-Doubleday, the second film directed by Sergio Castellitto shows an impressive growth in his filmmaking abilities, especially with regards to his direction of actors. A young girl is brought to a hospital after being struck down by a motorbike; it happens to be the same hospital where her father, Timoteo (Castellitto), is a highly regarded surgeon. While a colleague operates on the girl, Timoteo, a generally reserved man, begins to transform. While his daughter lies in a coma, he begins to confess to her a sordid and violent love affair that took place a few years ago with a derelict young woman, Italia (Penelope Cruz). In perhaps her most complex and challenging role to date, Cruz is simply sensational. One of the biggest hits in Italy last season, Don't Move received eleven nominations for the David di Donatello awards, Italy's equivalent of the Oscar.
Fri Jan 28: 6:30; Sun Jan 30: 2

MY MOTHER'S SMILE / L'ORA DI RELIGIONE
Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 2002; 103m
"Marco Bellocchio rolls the clock back to the heyday of 60s Italian art cinema, when he made the groundbreaking works Fists in the Pocket and China Is Near. Sergio Castellitto stars as an illustrator of children's books who is amazed to discover that his mother - murdered years earlier by his brother - is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church. Nothing could come as a greater shock to this staunch socialist-atheist, who finds himself drawn into a shadowy, surreal netherworld of decadent priests and cunning politicians. His one way out: the impossibly angelic young woman (Chiara Conti) who appears at his door, claiming to be his son's grade school teacher." - 2002 New York Film Festival
Fri Jan 28: 9:15; Sat Jan 29: 4:30

VA SAVOIR
Jacques Rivette, France, 2001; 154m
Sergio Castellitto scored his first major international triumph with his marvelous performance in Jacques Rivette's wonderful Va savoir. The luminous Jeanne Balibar plays Camille, a French actress who after three years in Italy returns to Paris in a production of Pirandello's As You Desire Me. Yet the return is bittersweet, as Camille has never resolved her feelings for Pierre, the French academic she abandoned. Meanwhile, her current lover and stage director, Ugo (Castellito), searches Paris for a lost manuscript, a process which leads him to the home of the beautiful young student, Do -whose brother, Arthur, is involved with Pierre's current wife, Sonia. As these various actual and potential couples duplicate, separate and commiserate, Rivette offers a brilliant reflection on life, romance, theater, art-making and love-making - and the impossibility of trying to consider these topics discreetly.
Sat Jan 29: 1:30; Sun Jan 30: 7

CATERINA IN THE BIG CITY / CATERINA VA IN CITTA'
Paolo Virzi', Italy, 2003; 90m
Caterina (Alice Teghil) moves with her family from the small town of Montalto di Castro to Rome. The sensitive and intelligent young girl enrolls in the 8th grade in one of the most prestigious schools in the capital, where she finds her class totally divided between the snobbish radical chic and reactionary spoiled brats. Worse, her own father (Sergio Castellitto), a frustrated professor, begins to manipulate her as he sees in the parents of her new school acquaintances the possibility for him to achieve a long-dreamed-of writing career. In the best tradition of the "Commedia all'Italiana", and with a whiff of political correctness, Paolo Virzi' - whose My Name Is Tonino was a great hit in last year's Open Roads - delivers an exhilarating, though bitter, portrait of present-day Italy in which Caterina's purity seems to be the only antidote to politics, vulgarity and greed.
Sat Jan 29: 6:45; Sun Jan 30: 4:45

HE LOOKS DEAD, BUT HE'S ONLY FAINTED / SEMBRA MORTO, MA E' SOLO SVENUTO
Felice Farina, Italy, 1986; 85m
One of Castellitto's first leading roles, HE LOOKS DEAD… is a cynical, dark comedy about two thirty-something siblings living in a modest, and unpredictable Rome. Castellitto plays a gambler whose greatest talent is getting in trouble. His sister (the marvelous Neapolitan actress Marina Confalone) falls in love with a drug dealer and runs away with him, leaving behind some "goods" in the apartment fridge. In Felice Farina's debut film Castellitto gets to show the full gamut of his emotional range; it's a tougher, scrappier Castellitto, yet one still feels that marvelous intelligence, that sense of a character plotting his next move even while looking you straight in the eye. Presented at the 1986 Venice Film festival, the film went on to become a surprise hit in France.
Tue Feb 1: 4:30; Thurs Feb 3: 2; Sun Feb 6: 4

LA CARNE
Marco Ferreri, Italy, 1991; 95m
The late Marco Ferreri was one of the first major filmmakers to recognize Castellitto's versatility and great talent, and to offer him an unusual leading role. In this controversial fairy tale, aptly named LA CARNE (The Flesh), he plays a piano player named Paolo who falls in love with Francesca (Francesca Dellera), a beautiful, morbid woman. Their lovemaking is so intense that Paolo finds himself physically paralyzed yet in a state of constant sexual arousal. They try to make the most of this rather astonishing state of affairs, but after a while Paolo becomes sick of his condition and finally Francesca relieves his paralysis. Yet only when Francesca decides to abandon him does Paolo come to realize how addicted he has become to the feel of her body. A streak of surrealism runs through much of Ferreri's work, nowhere more so perhaps than in LA CARNE, in which "mad love" takes a rather unexpected turn. A provocative film to rediscover.
Tue Feb 1: 6:30; Thurs Feb 3: 4; Sat Feb 5: 8:45

PADRE PIO
Carlo Carlei, Italy, 2000, 200m; on BETA
Carlo Carlei's Italian TV production opens on the last day of Padre Pio's life: after years of being regarded as a hysteric or fraud, the monk renowned for having received the stigmata receives a visitor from the Papal Office. Padre Pio - brilliantly played by Sergio Castellitto -begins to recount his life story. Moving from his initial feelings of religious calling to his later struggles against physical illness and earthly temptations, the priest tells how his increasing feelings of spiritual unity with Christ led to his being blessed with the "stigmata" - records of the wounds of Christ on his own body, first invisibly beginning in 1910 and then, most controversially, visibly from 1918 onwards until the day of his death, when they will disappear. News of the "miracle" spreads, and soon Padre Pio is attracting crowds of devotees and, inevitably, the displeasure of the Church authorities. Castellitto brings his trademark good humor to the role; in many ways, he seems as mystified by what's happening to him as do his superiors. Padre Pio bears all of these sufferings with great humbleness and obedience up until the day the Church, upon his deathbed, will recognize his sainthood.
Wed Feb 2: 1 & 7:30; Sat Feb 5: 2:30; Tue Feb 8: 2:30


ALBERTO EXPRESS
Arthur Joffé, France, 1990; 92m
In his first film for director Arthur Joffé (he's since gone on to work with him two more times, most recently in Local Call), Castellitto plays Alberto Capuano, a young Italian living in Paris with his French wife who's about to become a father. But before the baby is born, there's an old family tradition that Alberto must somehow satisfy: he has to repay his father, Alberto Sr. (the wonderful Nino Manfredi), for every expense from his own birth until he left home. With little money in hand, he jumps on a train to Italy, the "Alberto Express," to return to his father and see if he can negotiate his way out of this predicament. During the journey, he tries scheme after scheme to secure a financial windfall, while warding off the demands made in seemingly supernatural encounters with generations of his paternal ancestors, each of them seeking restitution for the sums owed to them by their own sons. This is the film that made Sergio Castellitto a star in France.
Fri Feb 4: 2 & 6:15; Sun Feb 6: 2
Mon Feb 7: 4:15

LOCAL CALL / NE QUITTEZ PAS!
Arthur Joffé, France, 2004; 102m
"When I cast my mind over the range of French actors, I couldn't imagine any one of them who could play the character in the way that I wanted. The mix of whimsy, candor and emotion without fear of ridicule, without fear of one's own image. You have to be a real virtuoso, and very selfless to keep a whole film on the razor's edge. Sergio is a world-class actor."- Arthur Joffé
An old coat that used to belong to Felix Mandel's (Castellitto) father is the only survivor of a ruthless housecleaning operation masterminded by Lucie, Felix's wife. Going out into the street, Felix donates the coat to a homeless man camped out on the sidewalk near his house, but no sooner does he perform this act of charity then his cell phone rings. It's his father, Lucien, enraged that his son has given away that coat. But then again, his father's been dead for two years…! From that day on, Felix's life will be transformed into a voyage of self-discovery; the coat will provide a passage into a world he scarcely knew about, a world bound up with his father's experience in the Holocaust.
Fri Feb 4: 4 & 8:15; Sun Feb 6: 6; Mon Feb 7: 8:30

MOSTLY MARTHA / BELLA MARTHA
Sandra Nettlebeck, Germany/Italy, 2001; 109m
One of the most delightful romantic comedies in recent years was especially enlivened by Castellitto's lovely turn as mournful-eyed sous-chef working in an Italian restaurant in Germany. The queen of the roost is most definitely its head chef, Martha Klein, who runs her shop with such terrifying severity that you wonder how everything can look so good. Then one day into Martha's life comes Lina, her eight-year-old niece, who arrives after the sudden death of Martha's sister. Martha does her best to get through to the little girl, but to no avail; enter Castellitto's Mario, who soon finds a way to reach out to both, a sad little girl and her willing if clueless aunt. Aided by fine performances by Castellitto, Martina Gedick as Martha and Maxime Foerster as Lina, MOSTLY MARTHA became a major international hit.
Sat Feb 5: 6:30; Sun Feb 6: 8:15
Mon Feb 7: 2 & 6:15
Tue Feb 8: 8:15

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