VENICE — A man who feels old age approaching and a child with his whole life ahead. In between is Naples. There is a house almost frozen in time: the drawings of a successful illustrator, his artistic crisis, memories of his father, his daughter’s wedding, the past returning, and a restless child who arrives and disrupts the orderly world of adults. There are films where a city serves as a backdrop, and films where the city, even when little of it is shown, becomes one of the characters. Scherzetto, Mario Martone’s new film, presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, belongs to the second category. Naples is not merely the place where Daniele Mallarico, a Neapolitan illustrator who moved to Milan years ago, returns to look after his grandson Mario for four days. It is also the place of memory, childhood, origins, guilt, escape, and above all, ghosts.
The film, based on Domenico Starnone’s novel and written by Martone with Ippolita Di Majo, places Toni Servillo at the centre of the story as Daniele, alongside the remarkably talented young Lorenzo Perrotta as his grandson Mario. Serena Rossi plays Betta, Daniele’s daughter, who has remained firmly rooted in the family home. The story takes place almost entirely inside the house and on its balcony, transforming a domestic space into a generational battlefield between grandfather and grandson.
Produced by MAD Entertainment with Rai Cinema, EDI, Picomedia, Scherzetto will be released in cinemas at a later date by 01 Distribution.
Mario Martone did not have to search for a particular key to approach the novel. It was, he explained, already present in his own biography and origins. “I am a reader of all of Domenico Starnone’s books,” he said. The discussion inevitably became personal.
“In my case, a Neapolitan born in 1959, having grown up in a family in which a certain patriarchal Neapolitan culture was certainly dominant, I find echoes and resonances in many of Domenico Starnone’s novels—things that touch me.” Those resonances include the elements that take on an almost physical weight in the film, becoming, for Martone, echoes of his own ghosts as well: “This whole business about balconies, about emptiness—all things that, one way or another, have been and are still part of me.”
Scherzetto also had another decisive characteristic for Martone: as a “prismatic” novel it gave him the opportunity to “make a film with many faces: a comic part, a dramatic part, an unsettling part.” “It is a ghost story, a reflection, a meditation on the passage of time and on life at a moment of reconsideration. A film about art and about the meaning of creation; a film about the chaotic origin of the world, represented by a five-year-old creature who appears on the stage of life knowing nothing, ready to turn it upside down.”
Daniele, the protagonist, left Naples many years ago. He lives in Milan where he moves in an intellectual middle-class milieu, and has become a celebrated artist, a revered master. His origins are working-class and Neapolitan, and the story poses a question that is simultaneously artistic, familial and about identity: who is this man, who has built his life away from home, really? Does his artistic work correspond to his deepest self, or has he constructed an image of himself based on an idea —and a reputation—bestowed upon him by others over the years?
This is where Naples becomes something more than simply a city left behind. It is the part of himself that Daniele has tried to overcome but that returns to demand an accounting. Daniele’s return to Naples is not merely a geographical return; it is a return to his family and a particular masculine archetype with which he must come to terms. The balcony is not simply an architectural feature: it is a threshold. Inside and outside, past and present, Naples and Milan, memory and reality. Daniele has returned to the house he left, and there he finds a version of himself that he has tried to keep at a distance. He encounters the ghost of the person he might have become had he stayed there.
The balcony becomes the place where inside and outside meet. Daniele is inside the house; Naples is outside. But the city enters continually: voices, sounds, the street, the past. It is also the place where the relationship between grandfather and grandson reaches one of its most significant moments. “When they are on the balcony, one outside and the other inside, this game reaches its climax,” Servillo points out, “and the characters become two children who, when they play together, have nothing else anymore—it’s simply the two of them.”