Llove that lasts a lifetime and crosses borders. The pain for those who are no longer there, the comfort in the sweetest and most bitter memories. These are the themes, treated with sweetness and intensity by the film She still talks to me by Pupi Avati and on the air tonight premiered on Rai 3.
Premiered on Sky in 2021 and never went to theaters, the film is taken from the autobiographical novel of the same name That Joseph Sgarbi – father of Victor and Elizabeth – he wrote in 2016, at the age of 95 (Giuseppe disappeared the following year). Giuseppe, known as Nino, was a pharmacist for almost half a century in the countryside between Emilia and Veneto and at the age of 93 he made his debut as a writer.
She still talks to me: the plot
We are in the Ferrara countryside. For sixty-five years Nino (Renato Pozzetto) has passionately loved his Rina (Stefania Sandrelli). Their bond, rather than an idyll, is based on maintenance, on the “building of a love” to quote Ivano Fossati. A love that goes beyond life: when the wife dies, the man keeps talking to her, behind closed doors, so as not to be heard by the servants and children.
It will be his daughter who will figure out a way to allow her father to talk about his wife again, commissioning Amicangelo (a ghostwriter played by Fabrizio Gifuni)the drafting of a collection of memoirs. Amicangelo accepts the job for economic reasons and initially clashes with the personality of a man very distant from him. But then over time the relationship between the two will become deeper every day until it turns into a sincere friendship. And Nino will open up to the writer to retrace his great love story.
At this point Nino’s memories will emerge: the most beautiful and the most painful ones, like the Polesine flood. A river of stories, of feelings, of nostalgia that is part of life and that almost becomes a medicine.
The cast and the places
Self Stephanie Sandrelli and Renato Pozzetto are the elderly Rina and Nino, their younger version has the faces of Lino Musella And Isabella Ragonese. NoThe cast also includes Chiara Caselli (the couple’s daughter), Serena Grandi (Clementina, Nino’s mother) and Alessandro Haber (Rina’s brother).
The story takes place in the Emilia-Romagna and Ferrara Po delta, in the lower Po Valley. Casa Sgarbi is located in Ro Ferrarese, a hamlet of Riva del Po. Monuments and glimpses of the historic center of Ferrara are added to the exterior and interior scenes in the rooms full of art relics. Some interiors have been recreated in the studio at Cinecittà.
Stephanie Sandrelli. (Sky)
Director’s story
“With She still talks to me“, he said Puppets Avati «I wanted to tell the story of a great love between Nino and Caterina, a love long 65 years, a love that lasts beyond death. The narrative pretext is a memoir that the widowed protagonist decided to publish, entrusting the writing to an ambitious and disenchanted Roman ghost writer».
«And it is precisely in the dialectic between these two characters, so apparently different from each other, that I saw the possibility of dealing with the present of our land and its wonderful past, in that portion of Emilia so special that it has been able to keep, alongside the modernity, the great charm of its past» concluded the Bolognese director. «I told about our land, our people, through yet another, different, angle. To continue to give meaning to our work».
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