My Milva is the one from «Flamenco Rock», at the time very popular on the jukebox of Bagni Umberto in S…: «At five in the evening there is no bull in the arena/At five in the evening the matadors are in bed/At five in the evening you can’t see a mantilla/On the ramparts of Seville they rock/Yes they rock”.
My Milva is the one from the first Sanremo Festival, the one from «Il mare nel cassette» and «Tango Italiano». My Milva is “Goro’s panther” who meets a refined intellectual and RAI director, Maurizio Corgnati, who helps her come out of the cocoon and transforms her into a splendid butterfly (but I would have learned this later, from Carlo’s stories Fruttero, friend of the Corgnati family).
«Milva, Diva forever», the documentary directed by Angelo Longoni and produced in collaboration with Rai Documentari, tells the story of the artist’s thousand lives, three years after her death (Rai3).
Above all, it tells of the intellectual journey that the singer has undertaken to become an international star: from the meeting with Giorgio Strehler, who transformed her into a Brechtian interpreter (the father-owner of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan wanted the actors to be his creation, even to the detriment of boredom) to the arrival at Scale where it leads to «La vera storia», an opera in two acts by Luciano Berio with a libretto by Italo Calvino (this is also boring). Luckily, Milva met great artists such as Enzo Jannacci, Franco Battiato, Astor Piazzolla who allowed her to express all her enormous interpretative abilities.
The documentary is rich in archive material, interviews and interventions: from Massimo Gallerani to Vicky Schatzinger, from Cristiano Malgioglio to Pino Strabioli. The most important part of the story is entrusted to her daughter Martina Corgnati (a talented art scholar, a passion inherited from her father), who collaborated on the screenplay and above all published last year a dense biography of her mother «Milva, the last diva» .
Curiously, the most intense moments of the doc are those in which the fragilities, contradictions and affinities of the artist found in the “collective consciousness” appear.
