If you are born on the outskirts of Naples and grow up in a small, overcrowded house (five brothers, two parents, two grandparents and five grandchildren), either your name is Massimo Troisi or you are resigned to anonymity since childhood. Massimo Troisi decided to live up to his name and fight against a difficult destiny, exacerbated since his youth by painful rheumatic fevers which produced heart failure in the mitral valve which would have been fatal to him at just 41 years of age.
On June 4, 1994, just 12 hours after the end of his most ambitious and challenging film, «Il Postino», Massimo slipped from sleep to death in his sister Annamaria’s house, in Ostia, where he had found refuge after the hardships of a set that he shouldn’t have had to face.
On the eve of the «Postino», Troisi had returned to America to the surgeon (De Beckey) who had already operated on his heart once in great secrecy at the beginning of his career. He knew he couldn’t face the double effort of conception and interpretation (even though he had left the direction to Michael Radford to get to the end of filming) but he chose not to spare himself to have the opportunity of Philippe Noiret in the role of the poet Neruda. He was resigned to meeting his destiny, after all he had always played hide and seek with death and had often made irony about it by outlining characters who disappear prematurely (“no, thanks, coffee makes me nervous” and even titling his TV film «Troisi is dead… long live Troisi» (1982).
Born on 19 February 1953 to a railway engineer and a housewife, the «Pulcinella without mask» that the public would have loved since his debut with «Ricomincio da tre» (1981), had trained on the stage, an instinctive heir of Eduardo and of a mocking and painful Neapolitanness that would have led to a different feeling, that of the “new Naples” of Pino Daniele and Roberto De Simone. With the group «I Saraceni» and then with the stainless friends of «La Smorfia» (Lello Arena and Enzo Decaro) he soon left the vernacular confines of village success to bring his language (a very lively and torrential Neapolitan, syncopated and colorful, «l “the only language I know how to speak, to be honest”) on national television networks and then at the cinema. As had happened to Eduardo and Totò, that speech became understandable to everyone beyond words, synonymous with a universal feeling in which the mask became a face and the character a universal paradigm.
The success was unexpected, sensational, immediate. It was the dawn of those 80s that brought the Moretti and Benigni generation to the fore together with him, but it was precisely with the Tuscan Roberto that Troisi found an instinctive empathy, celebrated by the public with the resounding success of «We just have to cry » (1984) in which his surreal «grammelot» served as an effective counterpoint to the paradoxical historical frame of an exhilarating journey through time to Medici Florence. Critics had loved director Troisi’s second work more (“Sorry for the delay”, 1983). Manon was always generous with the author, only to later give him great posthumous praise after the four nominations for “Il Postino” in 1996. earned the film an Oscar for Luis Bacalov’s soundtrack. But his filmography, often marked by his emotional and artistic partnership with the screenwriter Anna Pavignano, would deserve a revisit even today from «The ways of the Lord are finished» (1987) to «I thought it was love… and instead it was a carriage» (1991) .
Instead, it was a colleague, Ettore Scola, who sensed the potential of an absolutely unique actor/author to the point of making him the soul of his passionate «The Journey of Captain Feacassa» (1990) in which he wore the mask of Pulcinella and giving him the opportunity to talk on set with a master like Marcello Mastroianni. A couple of absolutely unique films came out such as «What time is it?» and «Splendor» (in 1989) and for the first Massimo was awarded the Coppa Volpi at the Venice exhibition. There was no shortage of awards in Troisi’s showcase (from the Davids to the Nastri d’Argento) but the global success of «Il Postino» shows how far the boy from San Giorgio a Cremano still had ahead of him. Twenty years later, the feeling remains of an unrepeatable and luminous talent that would not have existed without Naples but which has given Naples back the stature of a true world capital. Pulcinella without a mask today would be the right age to win the Oscar that fate denied him. But up there (like down here) many love him anyway.
