The strangeness: plot, cast, film review tonight on TV

If you are among those who theorize cinema or theater, tonight you will change your mind. On Rai 1, first-run TV, cinema, theater and literature combine (stage…) at their best The strangeness. Roberto Andò’s film, released in cinemas in 2022, arrives tonight on TV for the first time at 9.30pm on Rai 1.

One hour and 43 minutes of reality inhabited (in a Pirandello style) by ghosts who, instead of searching, are unconsciously sought by their author. Found? Perhaps. The beauty of The strangeness it’s that really, in front of each sequence, you don’t know if what you see is “true”. Or fruit of the pen of its protagonist Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936).

1920. The 80th birthday of Giovanni Verga (father of Verismo from which Pirandello’s work is very distant: Renato Carpentieri plays him), brings Luigi Pirandello back to Sicily (Toni Servillo). In Girgenti, the writer and playwright discovers that his beloved nurse, Maria Stella (Aurora Quattrocchi), passed away. The great author decides to personally take care of the funeral and burial.

He will thus meet two gravediggers – Sebastiano Vella (Except Ficarra) and Onofrio Principato (Valentino Picone) – who practice amateur theater for pleasure. However, a mix-up delays the woman’s funeral. Pirandello observes and studies the theatrical rehearsals of the Sebastiano and Onofrio company. Tormented by ghostly visionsmemories, strange apparitions, the presence/absence of a beloved wife now a victim of mental illness begins to create his new work…

The Sicilian director/screenwriter (The prince’s manuscript, Under a false name, The confessions), a lifelong lover of cine-literary graftsstated that the film is “a gift” from Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989).

«One morning many years ago (I still lived in Palermo), I found myself in the company of Leonardo Sciascia. Suddenly, he asked me to stop the car I was driving. “Sorry, wait a minute,” he whispered. And he walked towards one small bookshop. A few minutes passed and I saw him return with a book in hand which he immediately handed to me. It was a biography of Luigi Pirandello edited by a great scholar, Gaspare Giudice. “This is for you, I ordered it a few days ago. Is critical, and it’s the most beautiful there is.” This episode from my youth is probably the origin of my film The strangeness…».

The film is set in 1920. The work that Pirandello is trying to write will be a pillar of twentieth-century and contemporary literature (and beyond). We can also “put it like this”: The strangeness it is the story of how the author wrote, in Pirandellian style, Six characters in search of an author. Perhaps the most famous drama, the first of the trilogy on theater within the theatre. What it earned him, in 1934, the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Sicilian author, in 1920, lived in Rome and was truly in a personal crisis. There before the work that the film reconstructs respect what really happened to the Valle Theater in Rome on 19 May 1921. With the audience literally divided in two: detractors and admirers they (almost) transformed the Roman theater into a ring. They move theatrically on the stage (they rehearse another work by the author: The game of parties) who meet the Characters…

Two years later, and in 1923, Six characters in search of an author becomes the most famous Italian play in the world, transforming Pirandello intobest known Italian author internationally (in Hollywood, Greta Garbo will play How you want me). His “masks” become the emblem of Contemporary Man.

The news reports no trace of the two gravediggers…

What is the “strangeness” of the title? There is no clear and definitive explanation. The word is only uttered twice in the film. The first is in a vision of the deceased nurse that appears to the writer. The second is pronounced by Pirandello himself while he is talking to Giovanni Verga (Renato Carpentieri): «For now I’m only writing down fantasies… I have an oddity in mind, it’s almost become an obsession…».

Maybe it’s the sense of inadequacy (in the first case). Perhaps artistic creation (in the second), almost a source of embarrassment towards the regular flow of daily life. Roberto Andò manages to focus characters who really existed, freeing ourselves from the obsession with realism and from merely “historical” or “custom” films. Talks about death, life, reveries, visions and spirits. He captures Pirandello’s ability to immerse himself among the most diverse and dissimilar people to grasp theirunsettling essence. And similarities, assonances and uniqueness.

Not a drama, but not even a comedy, just like the works of the Sicilian playwright. We laugh, we are moved, we reflect. Pirandello-Servillo is a serious but not serious man, the gravediggers are a vital force in life and on stage. Until the next laugh, the next applause or whistle. Until the end…