The Italian job: Pierfrancesco Favino shines at film festival
Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino is one of the stars of this year’s Italian Film Festival and we caught up with him at the Venice International Film Festival.
Pierfrancesco Favino is one of Italy’s biggest stars and you couldn’t meet a nicer guy. Italians love him for his generosity of spirit and for his indelible performances in everything from dramas to comedies to action films.
The 56-year-old Rome native received acclaim for his portrayal as a real-life 1980s mafia informant in 2019’s The Traitor, he won the best actor Volpi Cup in Venice in 2020 for Padrenostro, was unforgettable in 2022’s Nostalgia as a man who returns to his hometown of Naples after 40 years, and he played a police lieutenant in 2023’s gripping cop thriller, Last Night of Amore.
We meet in Venice, initially to discuss Il Maestro, in which Favino plays a washed-up former champion tennis player who finds a kind of redemption by coaching a young teen. The actor is also happy to discuss Gabriele Salvatores’s Napoli-New York, which like many of his past films screens in the forthcoming ST. ALi Italian Film Festival around Australia.
Initially set in 1949 in war-torn Naples, Napoli-New York follows two impoverished street urchins, Carmine, 12, and Celestina, 9, who stow away on a ship headed for New York where Celestina’s sister lives. Favino plays the ship’s purser, Domenico Garofalo, who helps the kids once they arrive in New York and even takes them in as Garofalo and his wife have not been able to have children of their own.
“It’s a fairy tale, a wonderful fairy tale,” Favino says. “It’s a story written in the mid-1940s by Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, a famous writer who shared Fellini’s views.
‘he made this wonderful movie out of Fellini’s ideas and it’s based on real events, about the immigration of Italians to America’
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“But they never made the film and the screenplay treatment was hidden in a cage that Pinelli had in his house. So in 2006 when he asked a friend to get rid of the cage filled with all the papers, the friend, who was also a critic, found these pages.
“Some Italian film producers found it, bought it and wanted to make a movie and eventually gave it to Gabriele Salvatores who won the international Oscar for 1991’s Mediterraneo.
“So he made this wonderful movie out of Fellini’s ideas and it’s based on real events, about the immigration of Italians to America, especially after the war.”
The film cites that between 1861 and 1985 19 million Italians emigrated to America and never returned.
“Napoli-New York reminds you of the Italian movies of that post-war period,” Favino says. “There’s even a homage to Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 movie Paisan, where the kids go to watch it in New York and see Naples on screen.”
The major Italian entry in Venice this year was the opening film La Grazia, which re-teams director Paolo Sorrentino with his regular actor, Toni Servillo, 66, who won the Volpi Cup for best actor. The film, the centrepiece of the ST. ALi Italian Film Festival, tells of a widowed Italian president facing retirement, and had strong reviews.
“I’m very happy, because my wife’s in it,” Favino declares lovingly of his partner of 22 years, Anna Ferzetti, 42, before saying that he is not only proud of her but proud of what the film will do for Italian cinema throughout the world.
In La Grazia, Ferzetti has second billing as Servillo’s daughter who is instrumental in his decisions as he faces bills on euthanasia and pardoning killers.
Favino and Ferzetti have two daughters, Greta and Lea, born in 2006 and 2012.
Are they going to act? “I don’t know,” he says. “They’ve been around us for quite a while and they’re used to seeing everything. I come from a family where nobody was in the business, so I had all of the dreams, but I didn’t know anything about this world. My wife is the daughter of a famous Italian actor, so she knew. I’m very curious to see if our kids have this passion. I think it’s difficult for them having parents who are actors, so we just try to let them choose what they think is best for them. We encourage them to follow their dreams as much as they can.”
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So why hasn’t he worked with Sorrentino, who always casts Servillo?
“Paolo and Toni have worked together for a long time and they work so well together,” Favino responds. “I know Paolo very well and I like his movies. I don’t know, maybe one day it’ll happen.”
At his heart, Servillo is a serious theatre actor who plays intense often tormented characters, whereas Favino is more versatile and international. He was impressive as the bedraggled imprisoned Abbé Faria in the French blockbuster, The Count of Monte Cristo, where he teaches Dantès multiple languages and shares the location of a treasure. He also appeared as Angelina Jolie’s loyal assistant in Maria, a film set in the later years of the life of opera singer Maria Callas.
“Angelina was lovely and very generous,” Favino notes. “Pablo Larrain is a very interesting director and I thought it was a great script and I liked the movie very much. think Angelina deserved to be nominated for an Oscar.”
Favino also plays a well-off father to a rebellious 16-year-old son in the French coming-of-age drama, Enzo.
Largely now, Favino says he’s focused on working in Italy and France.
“I’m looking for roles I’m happy to play,” he says. “I don’t want to be forced to be in productions where I don’t think it’s going to bring me something as an actor, apart from, you know, being in international movies.”
The other major film in the ST. ALi Italian Film Festival is the opening film, the hugely enjoyable romantic comedy Somebody to Love, directed by Paolo Genovese (Perfect Strangers), which follows a modern Italian couple on their first date.
The festival’s special presentation is Maura Delpero’s 2024 Venice Festival Grand Jury prize winner, The Mountain Bride, about a family caught between tradition and modernity in the final year of World War Two.
Toni Servillo does double duty in Sicilian Letters, a story of dangerous liaisons set in early 2000s Sicily during Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro’s three decades as a fugitive from Italian justice. Elio Germano plays Denaro and also gives an award-winning performance as former Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer in The Great Ambition.
Another film following Napoli-New York’s theme of immigration but with an Australian twist is Signorella: Little Miss, which is narrated by Greta Scacchi and celebrates the tenacity and spirit of Italian women who helped shape the Italian-Australian community in the wake of World War Two.
The ST. ALi Italian Film Festival plays nationally, including Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas, Palace Nova Prospect Cinemas, Adelaide, September 17 to October 14; Palace Barracks and Palace James Street, Brisbane, September 24 to October 22; and Palace Cinema Byron Bay and Ballina Fair Cinemas, September 25 to October 15.