Stammering beginnings between neo-realism and Italian comedy
Italian neo-realism was the boot's main contribution to world cinema: location shooting became the norm, allowing directors to invest in cities and natural landscapes, and to come face-to-face with the sometimes miserable reality of the post-war era. Païsa (Roberto Rosselini, 1946) presents a devastated Italy: the characters take Vasari's Corridor to cross ghostly Florence, haunted by a handful of German soldiers. Perhaps because Italy is not short of picturesque and interesting locations, the great post-war filmmakers did not linger long in Tuscany. Fellini made a brief visit to his beloved Chianciano Terme for Eight and a Half (1963), or to Florence for a ball in the Goldoni theater for I Vitelloni. And when Visconti decided to set his Sleepless in Livorno in 1957, he recreated the town and its port entirely in the studio, as if to signal his departure from neo-realism. But it was in the charming village of Volterra that he shot Sandra (1965), starring Claudia Cardinale, an adaptation ofElectra that has been somewhat forgotten in his prestigious filmography. The unparalleled richness of Italian cinema in the 1960s was embodied in that very special genre known as Italian comedy, which corrected neo-realism by instilling a satirical verve that was sometimes extraordinarily cruel, but not without tenderness in its greatest successes. Such is the case with Le Fanfaron (Dino Risi, 1962), which features the road trip of Vittorio Gassman, the embodiment of the typical Italian macho, and Jean-Louis Trintignant, a reserved and influential student, whose race comes to a tragic end on the Tuscan coast. Mario Monicelli's Mes chers amis (1975), another jewel of the genre - which has aged more - features eternal teenagers whose favorite pastime is playing pranks across Tuscany. Florence-born Zeffirelli brings past and present together in his adaptations of Shakespeare, or in his hippie-flavored version of the life of St. Francis of Assisi, enhanced by Donovan's music(Francis and the Path of the Sun, 1972).
A Tuscany between tourist and personal visions
The tourist fascination exerted by a heritage of unparalleled richness is reflected in the cinema, as in Obsession (Brian de Palma, 1976), a remake of Hitchcock's Vertigo and a pretext for a stroll through romantic Florence, with its tormented tunnels, or the piazza della Signoria plunged into the night, under the enigmatic eye of the San Miniato basilica. James Ivory's Chambre avec vue (1986), an adaptation of Foster's novel, revives the tradition of the Grand Tour, in which Britons and Americans criss-crossed Italy to discover its many riches, both artistic and scenic. Much of this refined love story takes place in Florence, in the Basilica of Santa Croce, home to Dante's tomb, in the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata or in the Piazza della Signoria. Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, 1996), an adaptation of a Henry James novel in which the clash of the Old and New Worlds finds a fitting backdrop in the refinements bequeathed by the Renaissance, follows in the same vein. This vision perhaps clashes with that of local filmmakers, such as the Taviani brothers, who, in keeping with their style, present a version that is both more arid and more in keeping with reality in Le Pré (1979), shot in San Gimignano and the surrounding countryside, or in La Notte di San Lorenzo (1982), a poetic exploration of Tuscan folklore. Andrei Tarkovski, who was in exile in Italy at the time, reconciled the two visions in Nostalghia (1983), whose extreme austerity is not without its rewards for the most pretentious viewers: the abbey of San Galgano, the village of Bagno Vignoni and the abbey of San Salvatore, among others, make up the portrait of a profoundly spiritual Italy, immemorial and timeless, where it seems that old stones are endowed with speech.
Eternal, untouched, Tuscany
Italian cinema, once so prolific, went into a kind of decline in the late 1970s. The aptly-named years of lead gave way to a kind of sluggishness, a void filled in part by foreign productions that gradually found - and who would prove them wrong - a land of opportunity. Kenneth Brannagh's faithful adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing (1993) will appeal to fans of Shakespeare and the splendid villa of Vignamaggio in which it was filmed. Over the years, Tuscany has remained much the same: Bernardo Bertolucci's Stolen Beauty (1996), another famous name who had never set foot in Tuscany, is as much a tale of sentimental initiation as it is an ode to the Tuscan countryside around Siena. This year was particularly busy, with the release of The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996), a flamboyant melodrama set between Egypt and Tuscany (in the small coastal town of Viareggio, the village of Pienza or the former monastery of Sant'Anna in Camprena, now an agriturismo). As for Dario Argento, the pope of Italian giallo, the same year he delivered a very personal and inevitably horrific interpretation of the Stendhal syndrome, in a film of the same name in which his daughter, Asia, played the lead role and Ennio Morricone wrote the music. La Vie est belle (Roberto Begnini, 1998), a fable about the horror of the extermination camps that was widely acclaimed on its release, begins in the small town of Arezzo. Zeffirelli's final tribute to his native region, and in particular to the charming medieval hilltop town of San Gimignano, is one of his most enduring films, the autobiographical Tea with Mussolini (1999). What many of these films have in common is that Tuscany is presented as a haven, as is the case once again in Sous le soleil de Toscane (Audrey Welles, 2003), a sort of Hollywood tourist tract for the region. That's not to say it can't serve as a pleasant distraction, as well as a pretext for discovering the pretty little town of Cortona. It was partly here, as well as in Arezzo and Lucignano, that Abbas Kiarostami, for those who prefer a less standardized approach, filmed a stroll alongside Juliette Binoche in Copie conforme (2010). This talkative work gives an intimate, almost real-time sense of the gentle Tuscan countryside. Far from this idyllic vision, Marco Tullio Giordano's grand fresco Our Best Years (2003), which retraces almost twenty years of Italian history over six hours, looks back to the Florence floods of 1966, when the two brothers who play the protagonists volunteer to help the victims. For her part, Johanna Hogg's Unrelated (2007) plays on the contrast between the neuroses of wealthy English holidaymakers and the unruffled splendor of the surrounding countryside. It was near Pienza and Certaldo that the Taviani brothers shot their penultimate film, Italian Tales (2015), an adaptation of five short stories by Boccaccio that shows a certain return to form and, above all, captures the almost miraculous beauty of Tuscan landscapes and castles. Coincidentally, Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales , inspired by tales by Giambattista Basile, was released the same year. English-language, much more visually baroque and boasting a prestigious cast, it was partly shot in Tuscany. A recent James Bond episode(Quantum of Solace, Marc Forster, 2008) features a chase over the rooftops of Siena, which of course takes place during the Palio, and some views of the Tuscan coast. One of Italy's most promising directors, Alice Rohrwacher, shot part of one of her films, Les Merveilles (2014), about a family of beekeepers in the province of Grosseto, taking in the Etruscan necropolis of Sovana, the hot springs at Bagni San Filippo, and the picturesque village of Sorano. Television has also seized on Florence's rich history to tell the story of the Medici family and their rise to prominence during the Renaissance in a hit series that isn't necessarily particular about historical accuracy(The Medici: Masters of Florence, 2016-2019). Finally, Ridley Scott's biopic House of Gucci, released in 2021, looks back at the assassination of the grandson of the founder of Gucci, the flagship of Italian haute couture founded in Florence in 1921.
