TOTÒ WHO LIVED TWICE
Italy, 1998
Original title: Totò che visse due volte
Directors: Daniele Ciprì, Franco Maresco. Subject: Franco Maresco, Daniele Ciprì, Lillo Iacolino. Art director and editor: Franco Maresco, Daniele Ciprì. Cinematographer: Luca Bigazzi. Art director: Fabio Sciortino. Cast and characters: Pietro Arciadiacono (Pitrinu), Marcello Miranda (Paletta), Salvatore Gattuso (Totò), Carlo Giordano (Fefè). Length: 93’.
Format: DCP. Source: Cineteca di Bologna, under licence from Dream Film Ila Palma and Rean Mazzone.
Original version. Subtitles: English.
Restoration by Cineteca di Bologna with the support of MiBACT, in the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory.
When the famous prostitute Tremmotori arrives in the city, groups of men go to her, and Paletta, in order to participate, goes to steal from the votive shrine of the Ecce Homo, protected by the mafia boss of the neighbourhood. But before he can get close to the woman, he is in turn robbed.
“Divided into 3 episodes, inhabited by poor devils against the backdrop of a Palermo and a Sicily represented, as in the previous Uncle of Brooklyn, as the livid and hallucinatory scene of the ugly and monstrous. “The unitary theme of the death of God for a humanity that has lost its fundamental values” (Ciprì and Maresco) acts as a glue. With programs explicitly blasphemous in their desperate nihilism, the episodes touch on sacred topics, the 1st and especially the 3rd episode in which the story of Lazarus is told, in grotesquely distorted ways, according to the mafia rite of dissolution in acid and that of crucifixion. A monochromatic, repetitious, monotonous film that does not escape the suspicion of an obsessive damned aestheticism: a pitiless work even towards the very humanity it tells about. The last film seized by official censorship in Italy. Then released on appeal. “(Morando Morandini)
Tuesday 19 April 2022, h. 6:00 pm