Television drama thrives on flashbacks. It’s 1984 and at the Parioli Theater in Rome, while Franco Califano is in the dressing room waiting for a concert that will consecrate him forever, six carabinieri show up and handcuff the singer-songwriter and drag him away in front of his incredulous audience. In reality, things did not go that way: the “Caliph” was arrested in his villa in Primavalle on charges of Camorra-style criminal association and drug trafficking.
He knows the prison, involved in the maxi-blitz that was held against those affiliated (or presumed to be affiliated) to the New Organized Camorra of Raffaele Cutolo and Francis Turatello (a case in which Enzo Tortora was also involved). But this is news, sad news. Time leap: Rome, 1961. Franco is 22 years old, lives in Rome with his mother and brother, has lost his father, writes poetry and dreams of the Dolce Vita. After getting married, he abandons his wife and daughter and moves to Milan, as a guest of Edoardo Vianello. Yet more time jumps.
Prostitution and conquests
«Mentor» of the Rich and the Poor
The last years and the illness
Produced by Greenboo Production, written by Isabella Aguilar and Guido Iuculano, directed by Alessandro Angelini, “Califano” is a biopic on the adventurous life of one of the most popular singer-songwriters in Italian music, perfectly at ease both in committed art and in pop and light entertainment. If this drama is enjoyable, the greatest credit goes to Leo Gassmann, good both as an interpreter and as a singer. His identification process is almost entirely internal, even if the physical traits are sometimes surprising.
Gassmann gives us back with great participation the double soul of Califano’s songs: that of the street boy “hungry for life” and the melancholic soul of someone who carried with him the scars of a childhood spent between boarding schools and neorealism (“And the they call summer”, “The music is over”, “We are people of the village”, “Minuetto”, “Everything else is boredom”, “The snowfall of ’56″…). The direction, on the other hand, is rather descriptive, it never has great expressive highlights capable of creating a chorality around Gassmann that enhances his interpretation even more: it is often content with being just a frame.
2024-02-12 20:25:46
#Califano #fiction #enjoyable #Leo #Gassmann
