“While a pleasant enough whistle-stop tour of Pirandello’s life and career, one can’t help but wish that Eternal Visionary had taken a less hagiographic, more daring approach.”
Eternal Visionary (Eterno visionario), Michele Placido’s biopic of Nobel Prize-winning Italian author and playwright Luigi Pirandello, is yet the latest in a long line of films recounting the lives of legendary cultural figures in a way that most closely resembles a filmed Wikipedia page, though Placido occasionally scrambles the film’s chronology and the film benefits from handsome techs. While he doesn’t do anything to reinvent the genre, nor is it a deeply probing study of one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century, the film remains watchable thanks to solid performances and theater sequences that succeed in conveying the transgressive power that Pirandello’s works possessed when publicly unveiled in the years between the two World Wars.
Applying a framing device for much of its runtime that follows Pirandello on the 1934 train journey he undertook to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature, the film recounts how Pirandello (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), adrift after his wife Antonietta Portulano (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) became increasingly unstable and was eventually committed to a mental asylum, found his greatest theatrical success – and biggest controversy – by embracing surrealism and taboo behaviors in plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author and Diana e la Tuda, aided by his much younger muse Marta Abba (Federica Vincenti). This professional success is contrasted with strained relationships with his children and his encroaching fear of loneliness and aging, and the film presents a clear (if superficial) portrait of an artist who is never completely fulfilled.
While Placido touches upon many elements of Pirandello’s life – his work, his family, his relationship with Marta Abba, his Fascism – most of these aspects are treated in the most superficial way possible, which robs the film of much of its dramatic tension. In particular, his failings as a father and his right-wing political affiliations are given short shrift, which is unfortunate as both could have been rich sources of dramatic intrigue.
Placido is most successful at conveying how Pirandello’s work scandalized contemporary spectators, and it is in the moments where the film shows his plays being performed that it finds a real pulse. The sequence focused on the premiere of Six Characters in Search of an Author and the audience’s horrified reaction to its baroque styling, wild energy, and casual deployment of taboo sexual themes is particularly striking, and one can’t help but wish that the rest of the film embraced a similar abrasive tone.
The film benefits from strong performances, even if they are hamstrung by a surface-level screenplay that doesn’t fully flesh out these intriguing figures. Bentivoglio is appropriately imposing as the great writer, while also not shying away from showing his more melancholy side. Vincenti isn’t given much to do beyond playing a lovestruck muse, but she is a charming presence. The actors playing Pirandello’s children are all good, with Aurora Giovinazzo particularly moving as the daughter who is most affected by her mother’s mental illness and her father’s alternating between affection and distance.
The one performer who strikes a false note here is Valeria Bruni Tedeschi in the small but important role of Pirandello’s wife, hidden away as her husband’s literary career really takes off. Bruni Tedeschi is a performer who can be transfixing to watch when she is carefully guided by her director or cast in down-to-earth roles that play to her strengths, but she is also prone to mannered, irritating schtick when required to play overtly neurotic or unstable characters, and that is mostly the case here. From the moment she is introduced on-screen it is clear that Antonietta’s mental illness has had a destructive impact on her family, but Bruni Tedeschi overplays everything – the aggressive, hostile attitude, the chattering speech patterns, the manic gesturing – to the point of being a distraction. Only in her final scene, in which Antonietta is re-introduced as a somewhat calmer figure, does her performance achieve a depth and tinge of sadness to it.
While a pleasant enough whistle-stop tour of Pirandello’s life and career, one can’t help but wish that Eternal Visionary had taken a less hagiographic, more daring approach to portraying an iconic figure of both Italian culture and the theater world at large. Viewers who are either familiar with Pirandello’s work or who only know his name (if that) won’t learn much beyond a surface level re-telling of his most creative period, but they will get a hint of the unique power that his work held in a transitional moment of the 20th century.