Xan Brooks 

Il Giovane Favoloso review – a sweeping, swooning Leopardi biopic

Xan Brooks: This handsome biopic of the celebrated Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi may not be the most radical film on show at Venice, but still has much to recommend it
  
  

Il Giovane Favoloso film still
Like a big fragrant orchid ... Il Giovane Favoloso Photograph: PR

Ahead of the Venice screening of Il Giovane Favoloso, the heavens opened and the rain came down. A spectacular thunderstorm ripped in off the ocean, flaring the clouds, flooding the gutters and abruptly pitching the city towards autumn. The poet Giacomo Leopardi could not have arranged a more appropriate overture.

Hailed as the finest Italian writer since Dante, Leopardi viewed nature as all-conquering, all-consuming and geared towards disaster - at least for the human beings that it holds in its grasp. Mario Martone’s handsome period biopic paints the poet as an intense and sickly youth, given to prostrating himself on riverbanks and peering so closely at books that you fear he might lick them. Leopardi is pulled by agony in one direction and ecstasy in the other. Sooner or later he is sure to break down.

Il Giovane Favoloso rolls into Venice as one of three Italian films in this year’s competition, although it may be too tasteful and heavy to excite a jury reportedly on the look-out for more radical work. Even so, the film has much going its way. It’s a sweeping, swooning historical drama, unashamedly high-flown and performed with conviction. It blooms and then withers like some big fragrant orchid.

When we first meet Leopardi, he’s the hot-housed son of Italian nobility, the apple of his father’s eye. He’s being groomed for the priesthood, but that’s not for him. He’s penning verse in a frenzy, talking nineteen to the dozen, and questioning everything (“He who doubts knows the most of all”). Leopardi wants to kick out the doors of his family home and see some of the world before it eats him alive. The tale proceeds to bounce him on to 19th-century Florence, where his career is hobbled by the Catholic Church, and finally to Naples, with its noise and its colour. “It’s a city dominated by nature,” Leopardi explains. “And I will finally be able to live it as it comes.”

By this point, however, his health is failing; so alarming the landlady that she fears he’s contagious. Leopardi, it transpires, is not above giving a nature a little nudge in the right direction. When a visiting doctor prescribes a strict diet of fish and green veg, he promptly orders ice-cream instead.

Germano manages a terrific job in the role of Leopardi, where his twisted, writhing writhing movements suggest that the poet’s need to write may have been as much an affliction as his physical ailments. It’s just as well that the actor is so good, because the film heaps so much baggage upon the man’s hunched little shoulders. Il Giovane Favoloso provides viewers with an exhaustive (and borderline exhausting) voyage around its subject; the script ringing with rapid-fire poetry and philosophy that you long to have the chance to pause and consider at leisure.

The words are pouring out of Leopardi; he can barely put them on the page in time. At the rate that he’s writing he’s bound to burn himself out and we should reach the end credits in 20 minutes or less. It turns out, however, that there is still nearly two hours of his life and times to plough through. More resilient than anyone could possibly have imagined, Leopardi comes perilously close to overstaying his welcome.

 

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