Berlin (AFP)
No more mobsters for Matteo Garrone: the director of "Gomorra" imagined a magical universe to bring to the screen "Pinocchio", presented Sunday at the Berlinale (out of competition), before other adaptations of the classic children's literature expected soon.
The film has already been released in Italy where it is very successful. It will be on French screens on March 18.
In the role of Gepetto, the father of the "wooden puppet" who dreams of being a real boy, Garrone enlisted the troublemaker Roberto Benigni, who had also brought the classic of Carlo Collodi to the screen in 2002. Present in front of and behind the camera, he then gave himself the role of Pinocchio.
"I am perhaps the only actor who succeeded in making Pinocchio AND Gepetto", prided himself on the actor in Berlin, absent from the screens since 2012 and rather sober for his return.
More seriously, the director explained his approach: making a film capable of "enchanting" children.
"Our journey was to rediscover the text and drawings of the first illustrator, we then took a little freedom to create comic dynamics", with elements of commedia dell'arte.
"+ Pinocchio +, it is a fable which speaks about the human being, its conflicts, its temptations", added the one who made the classic of children's literature a black tale, with games of shadow and light and a desaturated palette to portray a poor Italy.
Her film is populated with animals and magical characters, such as the cricket and the fairy embodied by the Frenchwoman Marine Vacth, as well as a woman-snail, a monkey judge and crooks-cats.
No social criticism, however, in the film, Garrone, twice Grand Prix at Cannes, for "Gomorra" but also "Reality", preferred to focus on "the great love story between a father and a son". "I will not necessarily be the last to adapt this timeless story," he slips.
Rightly so since the Mexican Guillermo del Toro, winner of the Oscars with "The shape of the water", is preparing an adaptation for the streaming platform Netflix. It will be a stop motion animation film (volume animation, editor's note), which will take place in Italy in the 1930s.
Multiplying the remakes of its classics, Disney is also working on its own on a new Pinocchio, after that of 1940, with Robert Zemeckis (Back to the future ") in the making.
© 2020 AFP