Massimo Troisi: Somebody Down There Likes Me (Laggiù qualcuno mi ama)

You're Swedish, aren't you?

I'm French, from Maisons-Laffitte.

I'm Italian, actually. From Afragola.

My father sent me here...

One night, in an atmosphere similar

to the one that surrounds this sequence from Ettore Scola's Splendor ,

Massimo took me by the arm and started talking to me about the film

he had seen that evening, my first film.

We were at the Montpellier Festival in France, and I was startled.

Massimo Troisi was a beloved actor, and not just by us Neapolitans.

But for me, he wasn't just a great actor and a great comedian;

he was a director of special greatness, whose films constituted, in my opinion,

a single cinematic discourse.

A cinema that expressed itself in fragments,

in sudden jolts, alternating between fullness and emptiness,

sometimes lit up, sometimes weary.

To me, Troisi's cinema was beautiful because it had the shape of life.

Yes! It was Jordan.

Gaetano! Gaetano!

Gaeta'!

Gaetano! Gaetano!

Gaeta'! Gaetano! Gaeta'! Gaetano!

Oh! Damn it, why are you yelling like that, I'd like to know! What do you want?

Eh, nothing! I'm calling out!

And you're calling out! Dammit, at this hour you start yelling: "Gaetano! Gaetano!"

There are sick people here, they're all at home. "Gaetano! Gaetano!"

I'd like to smack you! You do this every night.

Oh! Why are you getting worked up? What were you doing? Were you watching TV?

I was watching TV, if you don't mind.

I mean, I was watching the news.

At a certain point, even the presenter who was reading it stopped and said:

"Excuse me, go see who that jerk is yelling like that?

Because we can't work here, we can't." You're making yourself known to everyone!

I just wanted to know what you were doing. They're going to the movies, what about you, are you coming?

- Are you coming to the movies? - I don't know...

- You don't know? - I don't know.

If you know, it's yes; if you don't know, it's no.

Before I met Massimo,

I always went to see him at the cinema

and watching him, I was reminded of the French films I loved so much.

Those of the "Nouvelle Vague," in particular the films of François Truffaut.

From what mixture of feelings and thoughts

did this irresistible boy from San Giorgio a Cremano

come to engage in a dialogue with those great French directors

who had revolutionized cinema in the 60s?

At the base was surely the total freedom

with which Massimo created his films,

amidst jokes, reflections, digressions, and melancholy.

You can't tell me that to my face...

No.

At the center was life,

staged shamelessly.

There was love, which is the center of life,

and everything became political simply because it was life.

You're ugly and you have to dump me anyway,

you don't have to get engaged! Better not, if you're ugly...

No, no, better this way. Bye.

Ah! I feel like running, are you guys up for a race?

Life, love, and more.

And in the Nouvelle Vague films, for example, people often run.

One, two... Oh!

Hey, hi! What are you doing here?

What? What's wrong? Did you run?

- No, I'm... - I'm exhausted too.

I've been walking for three hours. But you don't know my name.

And I don't know yours either. I'm Marta. Now you know, and you?

- Gaetano. - What?

- Gaetano! - Ah! Now I know.

If I told the truth, they didn't believe me,

so I would say something else.

In Truffaut's first film, The 400 Blows,

a child appears who we will continue to see grow up in his later films.

Just as we can see Massimo evolve from film to film.

Grappling with a life that flows and constantly slips away.

Has it ever happened to you, that for example...

I mean, have you made...

Love with someone?

Yes.

I mean... I'm going to the bathroom for a moment.

And what do you want?

She went with someone else...

What do you want? I mean, "Have you ever made love with..."

"Yes."

To me, that's what...

I just can't take it, it's all so... and bam! This thing just exploded.

It's how she said "yes."

"Have you ever made love with someone?" "Yes." Bam!

And it exploded in me...

There he is. Truffaut's child all grown up. Antoine Doinel.

Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel...

And here is Massimo. All grown up too.

Excuse me for a second, can you sign this for me?

Please, can you sign it for me?

I asked some people who loved Massimo Troisi

to weave themselves into the thread of my thoughts.

We are here at the home of the writer Francesco Piccolo.

Troisi was a bit of an Italian Antoine Doinel.

This thing here was obviously funnier than Antoine Doinel,

but it was, how should I say, crazy in the same way, right.

Unsuited in the same way.

In the end, the thing that brought him closer, and it's, how to say,

the most affectionate form of existentialism,

is the fragility, the inability to exist in the world.

I mean, there's a guy in Naples because...

- Listen, why don't you take off your jacket? - The jacket...

There was a guy... I'll put it here, okay?

It's clean anyway...

There was a guy in Naples who... made me...

Who was with his wife and the wife...

But how many pits are there... I mean, one sees a seed and says: "Can it really be"...

But I really don't know if you... don't really understand or if you really...

Can't manage to understand.

I'm the one not understanding, if you'll allow me, what... what that means...

Twenty-six minutes into the first half, Cesena...

- Has taken the lead. - Dammit!

Napoli is losing to Cesena.

...having received the ball...

In Naples!

...in the center of the Napoli area...

They spent all that money to build the team and...

Cesena is now leading Napoli two goals to one.

Cesena, which had already taken the lead in the sixth minute of the first half.

Then caught by Napoli, who equalized...

What's the matter, eh?

What's the matter? The matter is that Napoli is losing to Cesena.

Because of that? But I knew, I understood that...

It's fine, it's only the first half, don't worry,

it might even be that they equalize. They'll...

You see how you are?

The discourse on love

is the center of all of Troisi's cinema.

The characters he incarnated are basically

always the same character, his obvious alter ego,

but from film to film, the discourse on love changes, deepens, jolts.

One aspires to love, but one always asks if love is truly possible.

Are you... in love?

I don't know. It all happened so fast.

- And the smell of your Partner? - The smell is no longer enough.

- But do you still love me? - Why do you still love me?

- Miss, it's time! - Don't change the subject.

- I asked you a question. Do you still love me? - You're getting me into trouble.

He is honored to give the floor to your illustrious representative,

Honorable Cesare Sacchetti.

And searching, searching,

one understands that Massimo, making cinema,

was chasing an existential truth, hidden and deep,

that always slipped away from him. Like a mirage.

As if he had known that, as a philosopher says,

"it is because of our impossibility to love that we are condemned to love."

A love no less true and intense for that,

but in every film, love appears and disappears.

Oh, I warned you,

I told the person next to me that I have to act like a pigeon,

can't we talk now?

No, you get pissed off immediately, you disappear...

I don't understand you, look...

Ah! Let me in, right? At least. I mean, let's talk!

And why do you decide to talk right now?

You never wanted to do it.

You were with someone else and I looked at you,

and before giving my eyes time to fall in love,

my heart had already come forward: "Me, me!".

You know how your heart acts when you're in love.

You were with me, I looked at you and said to myself:

"How could it have happened that it's over?".

But I'm not giving up, I want to try.

Then my heart came forward and said to me:

"You want to try? Go ahead and try, I'm leaving."

You know how your heart acts when it's made a mistake.

I had always noticed, reading the credits,

that there was a woman writing the screenplay with him, always the same one.

It seemed like an important clue to me.

Massimo, a boy with the cultural upbringing of a Southern male,

regularly staged women by whom he let himself be thrown into crisis.

Female characters very different from the usual ones in Italian cinema.

Independent, fighters. Could he ever have done it alone?

Cinema is not done alone.

One always discovers one's own poetics through the relationship with others.

And today I am lucky that Anna Pavignano

is accompanying me on this immersion into Massimo's world.

This expectation that you had

of the fact that I was Neapolitan, many had it at that time.

And then they also expected me to be older.

Older than him. They expected me to be a kind of

maternal, Neapolitan figure next to him.

So, in effect, well, it was a bit surprising.

Both the fact that I was from Turin and that I was, at the time, young.

Surely this diversity was a strong trait, in my opinion, very strong.

He, a Southerner, you, a Northerner,

but in any case, fundamentally the first issue, he a man, you a woman.

It may be that I write with Ippolita Di Majo and therefore clearly,

I know what it means, the dynamic, the dialectic, the reciprocal enrichment,

let's say, right, between a male and a female point of view.

But in my opinion, this establishes in some way, also the strength, the motor, let's say,

of I'm Starting from Three and the subsequent films.

Yes, because he was struck

by the world that I carried inside,

behind, around.

We met and fell in love like two young people

who meet. Like all young people.