VENICE — The smile of Friar Leopoldo da Casamacchia, embodied by Pierfrancesco Favino in Giovanni Veronesi’s Dio ride, brought the 83rd Venice International Film Festival to a close. Set in 17th-century Tuscany, the film, which also stars Silvio Orlando, Alma Noce, Francesco Gheghi, Maurizio Lombardi, tells the story of a Capuchin friar with the extraordinary ability to preach the Gospel with a smile and a touch of humour. After escaping the plague, he becomes a prisoner of the Inquisition.
With traces of Mario Monicelli and Luigi Comencini, Veronesi tells a story of faith through the secular perspective of a “disbelieving, almost excommunicated, Tuscan,” as the director describes himself. Divided by four decades, Dio ride is, however, something of a response to his Per amore, solo per amore (1993): “I am fascinated by the religious world, a world that is difficult to understand because you need faith in order to believe,” Veronesi said in Venice. “Faith is the bridge connecting these two films: faith in love in the first, and faith in oneself in the second. Faith in oneself and in others is, in my opinion, the way to be honest and genuine.”
Friar Leopoldo da Casamacchia (Pierfrancesco Favino) flees his besieged, burning monastery, carrying the elderly Prior (Paolo Rossi), whom he loves like a father. The plague is spreading, and while Friar Leopoldo seems immune, the Prior is not. Alone, Leopoldo seeks shelter in a monastery in the Tuscan countryside, where a young friar (Francesco Gheghi) persuades his superior, Brother Monaldo (Maurizio Lombardi), to let him stay in the stable. He and his new fellows share poverty while preaching the Gospel from village to village. Friar Leopoldo is a humble man with little education, but he has a gift: he knows how to tell the stories of parables and miracles with a joy, passion and irony that are unacceptable to the Church of the counter-reformation, plagued by the fear of heresy. When the poor friar’s preaching begins to attract large crowds, Pope Innocent X himself (Carlo Cecchi) commissions his most influential inquisitor, Cardinal Maculani (Silvio Orlando), to investigate. A duel develops and the blunt theological weapons of the illiterate Friar seem capable of opening more than one crack in the Cardinal’s seemingly monolithic wisdom — the man responsible for Galileo Galilei’s forced recantation. However, Friar Leopoldo is already a target for the Church authorities.
With the disarming simplicity of a secular fairy tale, Veronesi and Favino have created a lively, cheerful character, charming and capable of inspiring wonder and joy with his almost childlike faith balanced between madness and holiness. Something of a holy fool, transparent in spirit and captivating in his theatrical, almost performative way of engaging people, the character at times recalls Saint Philip Neri as Veronesi himself has suggested.
Orlando, who embodies a Church entrenched in its unquestionable theological certainties, provides the perfect counterpoint, completing a historical and narrative picture that is sufficiently convincing. The freedom and spontaneity of the friar’s preaching feels fresh, engaging and entertaining, without falling into a spirituality that would be out of place here. When the drama arrives, it is experienced with the appropriate intensity by both Favino and Orlando.
In adapting the carefully constructed screenplay, written by Veronesi with Nicola Baldoni, Gianluca Bernardini, Nicola Deorsola, with the collaboration of historian Paolo Portone and priest Jean Jacques Ilunga, the director does not dwell too heavily on the historical context, instead offering essential visual and narrative elements through evocative images.
Veronesi’s attention is focused entirely on the human journey of the two main characters who, while opposed to each other, at a certain point meet on difficult, and crucial, ground: faith. While this is something both consider unknowable, it is perhaps more understandable to the illiterate Friar than to the educated, astute Cardinal, whose gaze reveals his crisis far more clearly than his words.
As the settings are essential to establishing the historical framework and conveying the idea of a rigid Church attached to its power and barricaded within its own ambitions, the locations were carefully chosen to present a clear and immediate message about the divisions and barriers that separated the people, the nobility and the clergy. In Dio ride, the rugged Tuscan countryside — rural, poor, harsh and seemingly endless — is set against images of Rome, which is highly urbanized, civilized and wealthy.
“I had already ‘baptized’ Tuscany in other films, but this time I discovered a Tuscany I didn’t know. A harsh Tuscany, much more expansive, but equally beautiful: the area between Siena and the Volterrano region. It is a wonderful place, with all these places featuring canyons, cliffs and rivers that open into little lakes among the rocks. They are all very difficult places for a shoot. But we made a major effort, both from a production and a human standpoint, because I wanted this Tuscany, not the Tuscany of Chianti or Val d’Orcia, a difficult Tuscany, as it might have been in the 17th century, especially near Volterra and Mount Amiata. I was looking for a completely different Tuscany,” Veronesi explains.
In contrast, the Rome of Dio ride is a city of richly decorated Papal chambers filled with statues, paintings and tapestries, as well as grand marble staircases. The warmth of the interiors and furnishings of the small stone castle, home to the local lord, Cosimo Del Debbio (Lorenzo Frediani), and his unhappy wife Isabella (Alma Noce), contrasts with the mud and cold of the wild places where Friar Leopoldo preaches to the people. Natural Tuscan landscapes, such as the Cascate dello Strolla and the area around Volterra, captivate with their untamed beauty.
Dio ride is a production from Indiana Production — a Vuelta company — Ogi Film and Piperfilm, in collaboration with Netflix, produced by Fabrizio Donvito, Benedetto Habib, Marco Cohen, Daniel Campos Pavoncelli for Indiana Production, and Massimiliano Orfei, Luisa Borella, Davide Novelli for PiperFilm. It will be released in Italian cinemas on 29 October, distributed by PiperFilm.