MARIO MARTONE: LEOPARDI/LEOPARDI: IL GIOVANE FAVOLOSO (2014) - OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA 2023 
ELIO GERMANO IN LEOPARDIGiacomo Leopardi's life of suffering and creationThis gorgeous, full-dress historical film recreates the troubled and remarkable life of the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century as well as one of Italy's greatest philologists, essayists, and philosophers, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), eldest son of a count in Recanati, in le Marche.
Leopardi was presented in the 2023 Italian series at Lincoln Center as part of a tribute to the director Mario Martone. Central to the film's success is the sympathetic performance of Elio Germano as Leopardi. It's an engaging story; but as happens with biopics of great men, there's a struggle to maintain balance between the achievements and the personal drama, and the personal drama decisively wins out.
This is because Leopardi suffered from extraordinary physical problems that progressively bent him over and made his short life wracked with pain. It is a remarkable and demanding physical performance by Germano, who is seen as Leopardi struggling more and more to walk and becoming bent over. The great poet and thinker is never forgotten by the film, but the viewer, especially the one not trained in Italian literature, comes away with a memory dominated by the broken body more than the wonderful verses and brilliant mind.
The childhood (when Giacomo is played by Filippo Chierici) is happy. We see him running and playing with his brother Carlo Orazio and sister Paolina. His brilliance is clear and he's put to work studying with priests but learns mostly, irregularly, plunging into the magnificent library assembled by his father, the grand and conservative Count Monaldo Leopoardi (Massimo Popolizio). We see displays of his knowledge, sight-reading Homer in Greek, and from Hebrew. We also may realize this isn't a balanced education but one steeped in language and philology. But he also reads philosophy, and refers to Nietzsche. And then we hear some of his poetry, which of course sounds poetic if experienced through movie subtitles, but for a true appreciation of which one must understand Italian.
The Italian subtitle "Il giovane favoloso," despite the richness of the mise-en-scène, is more wish than reality, because it is impossible to experience the full fabulousness of a life of such remarkable achievement. And while Giacomo angrily tells judges who deny him a prize who complain of his pessimism that it has nothing to do with his constant, increasing physical ill health, and we hear from him that he has dozens of projects, too many to complete, we see more of his love of Fanny (Anna Mouglalis), who is inevitably more interested in his best friend Ranieri (Michele Riondino), and this turns into a bromance when Ranieri leaves with Leopardi and takes care of him, which takes over the film's last half and is its most memorable and moving focus.
It is a physical feat for Germano, then in his mid-thirties, to look both older and later prematurely aging, and to go through all the contortions of Leopardi's disease of the neck and spine. It is speculated that he had either Pott's disease or ankylosing spondylitis, both deformations of the spine.
The childhood (when Giacomo is played by Filippo Chierici) is happy. We see him running and playing with Carlo Orazio and sister Paolina. His brilliance is clear and he's put to work studying with priests but learns mostly, irregularly, plunging into the magnificent library assembled by his father, the grand and conservative Count Monaldo Leopoardi(Massimo Popolizio) We see displays of his knowledge, sight-reading Homer in Greek, and from Hebrew. We also may realize this isn't a balanced education but one steeped in language and philology; but he also read philosophy, and refers to Nietzsche. And then we hear some of his poetry, which of course sounds poetic if experienced through movie subtitles, but for a true appreciation of which one must understand Italian.
An important early event is the visit from older admirer the classicist Pietro Giordani (Valerio Valasco) - a first recognition of his growing fame and reputation and a challenge to the power of his domineering father. But other memorable scenes indicate that during his lifetime Leopardi was misunderstood or undervalued and it was likely in years following his short life that his extraordinary achievement and importance as a poet became recognized.
The Italian subtitle "Il giovane favoloso," despite the richness of the mise-en-scène, is more wish than reality, because it is impossible to experience the full fabulousness of a life of such remarkable achievement. And while Giacomo angrily tells judges who deny him a prize who complain of his pessimism that it has nothing to do with his constant, increasing physical ill health, we hear from him that he has dozens of projects, too many to complete, we see more of his love of Fanny (Anna Mouglalis), who is inevitably more interested in his best friend Ranieri (Michele Riondino), and this turns into a bromance when Ranieri leaves with Leopardi and takes care of him.
Of course the problem with a writer biopic is that the audience can't spend much time watching the man at a desk with pen writing though that be the most important time in the man's short life. What we would prefer to see is Leopardi in front of a big window looking at the full moon and spouting verses he makes up about it. (This is one of the most beautiful images of a movie full of them.)
Leopardi was robbed of the great love a romanic poet was due, but his life is nonetheless a quintessential nineteenth-century artist's story, running from aristocratic origins to an impoverished early sickly death (he may even have had tuberculosis). And in place of love he had the passionate friendship of his great friend Ranieri. Early on he dreamed of escape - which his father did not want him to do - but eventually broke away with Ranieri and became "the toast of Florence." Later he and Ranieri move to Naples. There is a sequence suggesting (as Wikipedia does) that Leopardi's closeness to Fanny's younger brother reflected he may have been gay. The "more than twenty-five sentimental female friendships" Leopardi had in his lifetime (also indicated in Wikipedia), Martone doesn't describe in this vivid and impressionistic portrait.
More memorable sequences than any of the ones sitting at desks dipping quill pens into glass inkwells are those of a cholera epidemic in Naples when Leopardi dodges two men carrying a dead body along a cobblestone street, tall, thin, black-garbed figures coming to collect the dead from houses, and later, when Ranieri has arranged for the still-virgin Leopardi to visit a brothel and this becomes a hellish escape through fire-lit subterranean passages when he is mocked as "toady" and forced to run away. Martone pulls out all the stops in all these scenes: they are marvelously realized, though they are objective correlatives, one knows, for other things that can only be experienced in reading a book, for this is a man whose greatness is best experienced on the page, not the screen. But it is still good to have this film, even if it is a little overblown, to bring to life a great poet many have read, or to inspire others to read him for the first time.
Leopardi/Leopardi: il giovane favoloso,143 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 1, 2014. It was screened for this review at the June 1-8, 2023 Cinecittà-Film at Lincoln Center series Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.
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