‘Me, the tube and the pizzas’, even before being a beautiful posthumous posthumous film by Ugo Gregoretti, is a time machine that tells us about an Italy of the past that enchants with its beauty and simplicity. A country with people who are excited just by finding themselves on television, who still watch things firsthand and don’t film them with their cell phones, who know nothing about social media and still have kinder eyes.
A sort of nostalgia operation, this film created in 2015 and which now, due to various vicissitudes – including the precarious health conditions and the death of Gregoretti himself in 2019 – after moving to the Rome Film Festival in 2023 arrives in cinemas with a tour of screening-events accompanied by his son Filippo Gregoretti, co-star of the film, and other guests starting from Rome (18 June), Milan (19th), Turin (26th), and again Naples, Genoa, Florence, Bergamo and other centers for the month of July. Produced by Enzo Porcelli for Ahab Film, with the collaboration of Rai Cinema and distributed in theaters by Luce Cinecittà, ‘Io, il tube e le pizzas’ is full of incredible, very British irony and a unique style, both cultured and popular. “The project of making a film based on a screenplay taken from my book, ‘La storia sono io’, which talks about my private life and the salient episodes of my professional one – Gregoretti himself explained in his notes – had become for me impracticable due to the physical commitment it would have required. So I changed the approach of the work, instead telling the summary of my creative and professional path and the works I created for TV (which have innovated the language) and for the cinema. I therefore wanted to simplify the story, which, as conceived, required historical reconstructions starting from the 1930s to today, but I maintained the irony and enjoyment of the situations, orienting it to the most relevant moments of my professional career”.
The narration, concluded Gregoretti, “thus makes use of the guiding story written by myself who, together with a couple of newly married young people, takes us through the episodes of my professional life with the archive images of my films and my programs They are my counterpart, the evokers of my stories who, through their small provocations, arouse my reactions by creating amusing situations”. Among the film’s cult features: an interview with a very young Rocco Siffredi, the miracle of an image of Christ appearing on a doorway, cow groomers and, finally, a visit to a condom factory.
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA
