Notorious Italian Art Forger arrives on Netflix
TORONTO – After its recent announcement to ramp up Italian original film production, Netflix announced some of its upcoming films spanning several genres from action and sports to drama and comedy. This, following a substantial investment over the last four years which saw Netflix contribute over €1.1 billion to Italy’s economy – creating a wave of production jobs across the country. And one of those Italian originals is being released today – The Big Fake.
The film is inspired by the true story of Toni Chichiarelli, an art forger who capitalized on his artistic talent by working for gangs and fraudsters. Chichiarelli was also notoriously involved in the episodes which followed the infamous 1978 kidnapping of the then Prime Minister of Italy, Aldo Moro – forging a letter claiming Moro had been executed. The stunt helped to steer the investigation away from where the Red Brigade was hiding Moro.
Chichiarelli, a suspected neo-fascist and an informant, was not an official member of the far-left paramilitary organization but he functioned as an agent provocateur for them. His affiliations were with the Banda della Magliana, a criminal group out of the Rome neighbourhood who were suspected to be intricately linked with the Cosa Nostra, the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta.
His involvement in high stakes criminal forgery reached its pinnacle with the so called “Robbery of the Century” in 1984. A robbery masterminded by Chichiarelli in which he and two accomplices robbed a Securmark vault in Rome of thirty-five billion lire (fifty million Euros today). The three of them left fake evidence incriminating the Red Brigade, after immobilizing security guards and chaining them.
For six months Chichiarelli lived high and large off the spoils, until retribution came in the form of six bullets. His murder remains unsolved, along with many of the details of Chichiarelli’s criminal exploits. To many, while he was alive, he was known simply as the owner of a porcelain factory and art gallery, and a collector of paintings.
The Big Fake’s Director Stefano Ludovichi looks at Chichiarelli’s life as “artistic genius” gone astray – or as it is put in the film: what are you willing to do to get to where you want to be? Considering that Chichiarelli was from a small hamlet in Abruzzo, orphaned by his mother at the age of three and lost his two brothers by thirteen, his penchant for survival however questionable, made perfect sense.
In the lead as Chichiarelli is Pietro Castellitto who plays his character with evolving identities, often cunning but with a sense of tragedy – that a man so artistically talented could entangle himself in such illicit circles of Rome’s underbelly; and, that a love of paintings could take such an unexcepted turn into the fringes of respectable society or worse, into the depths of organized crime.
Images courtesy of Netflix
Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix
