Sorrentino Bringing Intrigue Back to Cinema
TORONTO – Plot details for Paolo Sorrentino’s mysterious film project La Grazia have been kept under wraps since the film’s announcement last December. While the practice of withholding plots and/or titles is nothing new for filmmakers, La Biennale di Venezia’s announcement that La Grazia would be opening this year’s festival prompts a discussion on film marketing. La Grazia is being tagged a “love story”, but this could be an intentional misnomer. Sylvester Stallone for instance has famously proclaimed that his 1976 classic was a love story with a boxing backdrop.
But on the topic of marketing and how studios attract audiences in a crowded marketplace, it’s interesting to note that Sorrentino is taking the auteur’s approach with La Grazia’s tight-lipped publicity. Woody Allen for instance, with his To Rome With Love (2012) purposely announced the film with a fake title “The Bop Decameron”, and then changed it to “Nero Fiddled” – just to keep the plot under wraps.
Christopher Nolan, one of cinema’s more respected and acclaimed filmmakers of the last 25 years, similarly keeps his work under lock and key. When the British filmmaker directed Batman Begins (2005) he required that Michael Caine read it while he was in his home, and return it before leaving. And when Anne Hathaway read for the role of Catwoman in a subsequent Batman sequel, she was reprimanded by Nolan after attempting to leave his house with her script sides.
It can be argued that prior to the 21st century, it was more common than not for Hollywood Studios to use cryptic or intrigue marketing. A touch of ambiguity to pique the audience’s interest was often the tactic – even with big box office fare. But with the advent of the Internet in the mid to late nineties, major studios began panicking, anticipating that this new media was creating a new [attention deficient] audience.
In 2000, director Robert Zemeckis made Cast Away, a film about a FedEx troubleshooter whose plane crashes in the South Pacific leaving him cast away an island. The film’s preview famously upset many filmgoers by spoiling the fact that the main character is eventually rescued. “We know from studying the marketing of movies, people really want to know exactly everything that they are going to see before they go see the movie”, claimed Zemeckis at the time.
Hopefully La Grazia will spark a trend and mark a new era in cinema, one closer to the days where films were considered works of art as opposed to commodities. La Grazia is starring Toni Servillo and will be the actor’s seventh collaboration with Sorrentino. Their first collaboration was Sorrentino’s 2001 debut One Man Up in which Servillo played an ageing cocaine-addicted singer.
“Paolo Sorrentino’s return [to Venice] in competition comes with a film destined to leave its mark for its great originality and powerful relevance to the present time, which the audiences of the Venice Film Festival will have the pleasure of discovering on opening night”, concluded the festival’s director Alberto Barbera.
(Image of La Grazia courtesy of The Apartment Pictures – Image of Sorrentino courtesy of The IPA Agency)
Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix
