Massimo Troisi died thirty years ago, on the night between Friday 3 and Saturday 4 June 1994: he was 41 years old, and for at least a decade he had been considered one of the best Italian actors around, appreciated for his surreal humour, straddling the self-pity and great lucidity, and for his ability to preside over all the processes underlying the making of a film, from direction to screenplay.
A few hours before his death he had finished filming The postmana film that he cared a lot about and which was characterized by a rather troubled production, also due to a complication of some heart problems from which he had suffered since he was a child.
Despite his serious health conditions, Troisi dedicated a lot of time and energy to the making of the film, which took up most of his last months of life. He participated in almost all the production phases: in addition to playing the protagonist, the postman Mario Ruoppolo, and helping the director Michael Radford in managing the actors and choosing the shots, he wrote the screenplay together with Anna Pavignano, Furio and Giacomo Scarpelli and Radford himself.
Troisi had become famous in the early 1980s, making himself known for his versatility and ability to combine two apparently distant acting styles, one more comical and light-hearted, the other more sentimental and thoughtful. During that period he starred in hugely successful films, such as I’ll start again from three, Sorry for the delay (of which he was also director) and above all We just have to crythe result of a memorable collaboration with Roberto Benigni.
Even if his comedy was very linked to his origins, Troisi was also Neapolitan in a personal way and opposed to the clichés of Neapolitanness, which he often tried to make fun of and criticize with shy, awkward, sensitive characters. This trend became even more evident starting from the second half of the 1980s, when Troisi’s characters became increasingly more complex and independent from the comic side, with more serious and melancholy characterizations. The postman it is considered the most representative film of this second phase of his career, and is often compared to a sort of artistic testament by Troisi, who decided to postpone a heart transplant operation in order to complete it.
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The film is loosely based on a novel that Troisi loved very much, Neruda’s postman by the Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta. A couple of years earlier he had received a copy as a gift from Nathalie Caldonazzo, his partner at the time: after reading it he was so enthusiastic about it that he purchased the rights for a future film adaptation.
He decided to entrust the direction to the British director Michael Radford, who about ten years earlier had offered him a role in his debut film, Another Time, Another Place – A love story (1983). Troisi rejected the proposal, but after being pleasantly amazed by Radford’s subsequent works (Orwell 1984 And White misdeed) phoned him to apologize and promised that in the future they would work on a film together: the opportunity was exactly right The postman.
Skármeta’s book tells the story of Mario Jiménez, a fisherman who is appointed postman of the remote village of Isla Negra, in Chile, with the task of delivering the mail to the only person who receives mail in that place: the poet Pablo Neruda , with whom he forms a deep bond of friendship.
To set the film in Italy, Troisi decided to make some changes: Isla Negra was replaced by an island in Southern Italy where Neruda (Philippe Noiret) he had received political asylum after being forced to leave Chile due to his communist ideas, while Jiménez was replaced by Mario Ruoppolo (Troisi).
To complete the screenplay, in the summer of 1993 Radford, Troisi and Scarpelli (Furio) moved for a period to the United States, to Los Angeles. Troisi took the opportunity to go to Houston, Texas, and be examined in the same hospital where 18 years earlier he had undergone an operation on the mitral valve, the one that connects the left atrium and ventricle of the heart. The tests highlighted a deterioration of the titanium valves that had been implanted in 1976, and Troisi was subjected to emergency cardiac surgery: in the operating room he had a heart attack, and was forced to stay in hospital for almost two months.
The doctors advised him to have a heart transplant, but Troisi decided to postpone the operation to conclude The Pstubborn, whose production was now at an advanced stage.
Filming began on March 14, 1994, and lasted 12 weeks. They took place in three different places: the Cinecittà studios in Rome, Salina (the island where the house where Neruda lives in the film is located) and Procida. The filming period was very tiring for Troisi, who due to tiredness and constant heart problems could only stay on set for a few minutes at a time. “He was very ill, he had the physical condition of an 83-year-old person: he could walk around a maximum of an hour a day, remaining seated the whole time,” Radford said, speaking of all the difficulties he encountered in those 12 weeks.
To shoot the most tiring scenes, those on bikes, a stunt double was hired: Gerardo Ferrara, a physical education teacher from Sapri, in the province of Salerno, who was chosen because of his extraordinary resemblance to Troisi. He was recruited quickly, after being contacted by the partner of one of the director’s operators. In an interview given to Corriere della Sera, Ferrara said that in the last days of filming Troisi «was very tired: one afternoon he asked to stop because he couldn’t carry on. And we all stopped, out of respect for him.”
On June 3, immediately after filming ended, Troisi went to rest at his sister’s house, in the Roman hamlet of Infernetto. He died during his sleep from a heart attack. The postman It was released at the cinema on 22 September, and was immediately received enthusiastically by critics, in particular the American ones, who were also very impressed by the circumstances of Troisi’s death. The journalist of New York Times Janet Maslin wrote that the film represented an “eloquent but also heartbreaking tribute to Troisi’s talent”, and that “the comic discomfort that [Troisi] brought to this interpretation clearly has a component of real pain.”
The film was nominated for five Oscars and won one, for the soundtrack, awarded to the Argentine composer Luis Bacalov. Troisi earned a posthumous nomination for Best Actor, an award that ultimately went to Nicolas Cage for Out of Las Vegas.
