Berlin Review: Paolo Taviani’s ‘Leonora Addio’

deadline.com:

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani directed films together from the early 1950s until Vittorio died in 2018, leaving his now 90-year-old brother to carry on alone.

Leonora Addio, the second film Paolo has made without Vittorio, is not only dedicated to him but picks up many of the themes that ran through their earlier work, including their enthusiasm for theater in general and the writings of Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello in particular.

The Berlin Film Festival competition entry looks and sounds sumptuous, but its two stories — both of which raise questions about what the living owe the dead — are disappointingly slight.Pirandello wrote novels and poetry, but he was most famous as a playwright fond of theatrical trickery; today, his best-known play is Six Characters In Search Of An Author.

Accordingly, Leonora Addio (the title is taken from one of his stories, about a woman who dies while singing) is filmed and performed with an operatic sense of artificiality.It begins in Pirandello’s final sick room, a vast white room with his bed in the center and books lined up on a far-off wall; we could be on the stage of La Scala.