Literature on Film: Leonora addio

Three years after the loss of his brother Vittorio, with whom he shared his entire career, Paolo Taviani returns to the works of Luigi Pirandello, the Italian playwright, novelist, poet, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature whose stories the pair adapted in 1984 (Kaos) and 1998 (You Laugh). In keeping with the Sicilian playwright’s vision, the film is not at all what it appears to be.

While the title may come from a 1910 novella, there is no trace of that book’s jealousy-riddled plot. Instead, the focus is on Pirandello himself – or rather, his ashes, which are transported from a hasty burial site in fascist Rome to a permanent resting place in Sicily on a trek that takes us through post-war Italy and its filmed memories, as seen in newsreels, amateur films, and fragments of neorealism. Having buried the master, Leonora addio then shifts gears from road movie to film adaptation, but here it picks a different Pirandello story – namely his last one, written shortly before his death in 1936.

From the farewell of the title to its return to the writer’s last words, it is hard not to read this work – so free and yet so much a part of the Taviani world – as a moving brotherly farewell which, just as in 2012’s Golden Bear winner Caesar Must Die, once again uses cinema to give voice to literature and history.

Film version:
Italy, 2022, 90 min.
Language: Italian
Directed by: Paolo Taviani
Genre: Drama
Age rating: 15+
The film will be screened in the original language with Czech and English subtitles.