“A strong entry in the body of work of Italy’s most irreverent director.”

Franco Maresco is missing. After a disastrous shoot for his new film went kaput, the idiosyncratic filmmaker, satirist, and all-round madman has vanished into thin air. It is up to his friend and screenwriter Umberto (Umberto Cantone) to find him, retracing the enfant terrible’s steps during the shoot and during his career. There is only one person who knows where Maresco is, a god-fearing and continuously praying errand boy (Giuseppe Lo Piccolo) who will chauffeur Umberto around Sicily, but never seems to get anywhere near Maresco. Another quasi-documentary where nothing is like it seems and everything seems like it’s nothing, Un film fatto per Bene is an acquired taste. The title itself is a bit of clever wordplay, meaning both ‘a well-made film’ (poking fun at itself, since it is anything but) and ‘a film for Bene’, referencing the ostensible subject of the film Maresco was making, legendary poet and stage actor Carmelo Bene. A healthy slice of Italian absurdism laden with in-jokes and grand statements that make no sense, certainly not to non-Italians, and a work that will be unlikely to travel abroad. But if the Italian audiences in the Venice festival’s screenings are anything to go by, Maresco’s latest farce should have a healthy life on home turf.

The film gone awry under the megalomaniac guidance of the gruff-looking, thick-bearded director was to deal with a simple-minded monk (a wonderfully silly Bernardo Greco), flying saints, a donkey, and somehow Carmelo Bene. The Don Quixote-like story turns into a veritable Lost in La Mancha (after Terry Gilliam’s infamously troubled filming of Cervantes’ classic), with a lead actor who can’t remember his lines, a rebellious crew, a tyrannical director, and catastrophic stunt work. Umberto traces the process every step of the way, together with the film’s producer, Andrea Occhipinti, who saw the budget dwindling quickly because of Maresco’s ever-expanding visions for the film, and decided to pull the plug.

The film then shifts to a fly-through of Maresco’s storied career, one marked by scandal and success (both ludicrously overstated for comedic effect), beginning with partner-in-crime Daniele Ciprí. They started working together on the satirical Cinico TV, a show poking fun at everyday people that landed a berth on Rai 3 (Italy’s third public TV channel). They went on to make three feature films, including 1998’s Totò che visse due volte, temporarily banned in Italy on accusations of blasphemy. The duo’s absurdist and irreverent comedy, somewhere between Monty Python and Spitting Image, gained them a dedicated following of fans and haters, but it solidified Maresco’s place in the Italian cinema landscape as a misfit dedicated to slaughtering sacred cows.

The framing device of Umberto’s quest to find his friend wears thin pretty quickly, mainly because the running gag of the pious driver runs its course after one scene. The overview of Maresco’s career, while containing some brilliant moments featuring the cantankerous director and showing his biggest claim to fame, winning a Special Jury Prize in Venice for 2019’s The Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be, feels like it’s part of another documentary altogether, a more serious look at the oeuvre of an unserious man. The highlights of Un film fatto per Bene are clearly the fake behind-the-scenes looks at the ill-fated shoot, some of it shot in black and white as if an absurdist riff on Fellini, although it’s played off like some religious and philosophical masterpiece (a parody of The Seventh Seal in particular works well in this regard). As we reach the apotheosis, the moments the film-within-a-film started to really fall apart, Maresco takes swipes at some of Italy’s most well-known film critics, then involves one of them, Francesco Puma (“One of the biggest idiots I’ve ever met,” according to Maresco) as an actor in his film, only to continuously torment him while shooting his scenes (“At times I gave him some respite and went on to torture the other actors,” Maresco muses in voice-over).

Of course none of this is real, probably. Likely. Maybe? It is a recurring modus operandi in Maresco’s career, to present his work as fundamentally serious while taking the mickey out of everyone and everything, including, and even primarily, Franco Maresco. When he declares himself a genius director on the level of Italy’s past greats, with serious matter-of-factness and in pompous language, the idea is to not take him seriously at all. Nor his outbursts at his crew and actors, which have the air of a ‘making of’, but are carefully staged with little room for improvisation. This kind of work will limit its audience to those attuned to Maresco’s sense of humor, and with the added layer of references and jokes that only those well-versed in Italian pop culture will get, the group of people this film is aimed at is small. Still, there is enough universal absurdism and blunt boorishness to solidify Un film fatto per Bene as a strong entry in the body of work of Italy’s most irreverent director.