The Passion

Venice (In Competition) – Can a rural production of The Passion help an ennui-afflicted movie director recover his er, passion? Seeking answers, Paul Martin takes a trip to Tuscany.

The urbanite abandoned in a backwater small town, a place where folks do things a little differently, where the pace of life is several gears slower, where Twitter is a noise that birds make, has been a comedy movie staple for many years now, providing the culture clash juice for everything from Local Hero to City Slickers to Deliverance (second thoughts, scratch that last one). We are all now more than familiar with the emotional journey the main character will take; they first treating the apparently bumbling yokels with outright contempt, before slowly warming to the simple life, and eventually, in all likelihood, getting off with the one hot chick in the village. And The Passion, a comedy which is nothing if not old-fashioned, does not deviate too far from this time-weathered feelgood formula, as film director Gianni Dubois (a likeable but too-often mugging Silvio Orlando) finds himself effectively blackmailed into helping the community of a small Tuscan town.

Having been inactive for five years, Gianni is despondent about ever coming up with a suitable story for a new movie. Yet just as sewer rat studio man Pippo is applying serious pressure on the filmmaker to fashion a vehicle for TV starlet Flaminia (Cristiana Capotondi), Gianni is summoned away from the bright lights of Rome to central Italy, to tend to a plumbing crisis afflicting his holiday home. As bad luck would have it the water damage has not been confined to the now sealed-off property, it having seeped through to a neighbouring church and damaged a 16th century fresco of Christ up on the cross. With the local authorities not kindly disposed to wealthy city dwellers hoovering up local houses to use as weekend boltholes, Gianni is told the matter will only be dropped if he turns his talents to directing a Good Friday production of The Passion, a dormant village tradition the powers-that-be wish to revive.

The script for The Passion is credited to a quartet of writers, including director Carlo Mazzacurati and Umberto Contarello, who has co-written forthcoming Sean Penn-starrer This Must be the Place with Paolo Sorrentino, and where it does succeed is in the laying of narrative timebombs for the ever-embattled Gianni to defuse. He has only five days to assemble his Passion procession, he has only three to come up with a movie idea that Flaminia will want to commit to. If he neglects the undertaking in the village, the damage caused to the fresco will be reported to the cultural heritage department and he will be outed as a typically selfish member of Italy's showbiz set. If he draws a blank on the film front, his already-declining career will effectively be over. The multiple pressures placed on Gianni are very clearly laid out, and the feeling is that these competing, contrasting labours should be wellsprings of comic delight.

And yet while Mazzacurati's movie draws periodic chuckles, the humour is hugely variable – certainly as far as I was concerned. Emma caught Ozon's Potiche a few days ago and I think it is not inaccurate to say she was left equally bemused by the sheer lack of subtlety of many of the jokes and the hysterical laughter said jokes incited in the screening she attended. Well, I had a very similar experience with The Passion, suggesting that this is a picture which could struggle to find an appreciative audience in cynicism-soaked Blighty.

For example, there is an early scene which sees Gianni swatting away a couple of bothersome hitchhikers while he speaks on his mobile. Call concluded, he hops back in his car and begins to drive away, only to look in his rear-view mirror and see the hitchhikers staring back at him from his backseat. He screams, they scream, the brakes are slammed on. Silly enough to trigger a bare ripple of amusement you would think, but not only did this sequence have the audience in my screening laughing like tickled hyenas, there was even a loud round of applause at its end. I, for my part, sat there in utter bewilderment.

A comparable cultural comedy chasm seemed to open up when the character of Manlio Abbruscati was introduced. Played by Brendan Fraser-lookalike Corrado Guzzanti, the black-haired Abbruscati is a TV weatherman characterised by a bleakly melodramatic style of presentation, more Macbeth than Ian McCaskill, who is then engaged to play the lead role of JC in Gianni's religious-themed production. And good lord, if the crowd didn't hoot and holler at this fella's every scene. So electric was the reaction to this seemingly one-dimensional figure that I was left scratching my head at the paroxysms of laughter which greeted his every appearance, wondering if there was some sophisticated satire at play I had simply failed to grasp.

Having said all that, there are undeniably some good gags in the film, albeit only on those occasions where surprise is permitted to triumph over obvious buffoonery. I liked the class of schoolchildren press ganged into making copies of The Passion script when a photocopier cannot be commandeered for the task, with this then delivering the later comic pay off that the actors find themselves with differing documents depending on what mistakes each kid made – Abbruscati even finding juvenile nostril expulsions on his. Likewise, a witty scene finds a doctor who is treating Gianni unexpectedly citing footballer Roberto Baggio's time at Brescia as a sympathising instance of when a genius was cast out into the wilderness. But such imaginative moments are offset by gags almost as old as the story of the crucifixion itself – the busty landlady offering altogether too much hospitality; a towel inopportunely falling off when the director emerges from the shower; the fight to get a decent mobile phone reception out in the country; a race to hide every newspaper in the village when an article is printed that seems likely to offend Gianni.

Shot without embellishment, this seems a rather lightweight contender for the Golden Lion. There is however undeniable emotion underpinning the venture, such as the heartache of the beautiful Polish girl (played by Kasia Smutniak) whose woes with her musician lover finally allow Gianni to recover some degree of artistic inspiration, or the kindness the director displays towards big-hearted ex-convict Ramiro (Giuseppe Battiston), the friendship between the two shining through as both genuine and touching.

Rating on a scale of 5 weathermen of the apocalypse: 3

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Carlo Mazzacurati
Screenplay by: Umberto Contarello, Doriana Leondeff, Carlo Mazzacurati, Marco Pettenello
Cast: Silvio Orlando, Giuseppe Battiston, Corrado Guzzanti, Kasia Smutniak
Cert: TBC
Running Time: 106 minutes

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