Eterno visionario

1934: On a train to Stockholm, where he will shortly receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, Luigi Pirandello relives his fascination with the figures in his life who also inspired his art. Eterno Visionario concentrates on one phase of Pirandello’s career in order to show the playwright’s more intimate side, trapped between his muse and lover Marta Abba and his wife Antonietta, in a vivid and authentic portrait of an eternal visionary.

COMMENTARY
From the solfataras of a backward Sicily to Stockholm, where he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934: the life of Luigi Pirandello was one of extremes, and this aspect fascinates Michele Placido. The director, drawing on the biography by Matteo Collura, Il gioco delle parti, puts it all on film: the hellish family life of the author of Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello’s wife, Antonietta Portulano, was in a mental asylum); his triumphs and scandals on the stage; his relationship with his true love, Marta Abba, and his controversial links to fascism. Placido helps himself to the part of Saul Colin, Pirandello’s agent and collaborator, and rightly finds Fabrizio Bentivoglio the perfect fit to play an artist who grasped, early in his 20th century, that personal identity was dissolving, and ably depicted society’s traps and intrinsic pretence.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
Eternal Visionary is a film that, for the first time, tells the truth about Luigi Pirandello’s life and career. A literary genius and a superb playwright, he was far from the solid family man he has been passed off as until now. Indeed, Pirandello seems to have sought out, in unhappiness, the most powerful impulse to create his masterpieces. If one gets to the bottom of his life, which this film succeeds in doing, he could well be one of his own characters. This is a cinematic account that zeroes in on Pirandello’s devastating inner tension, heightened when he falls in love with the actress Marta Abba, who remains his impossible dream.