Zalone on the Verge of International Stardom
TORONTO – Film Distributors typically steer clear of comedies due to their high cultural specificity, and for the difficult process of adapting them to foreign audiences. This is why great Italian comedy and their comedians, for example, remain virtually unknown worldwide. Massimo Troisi was perhaps the prime example of a genius the world outside of Italy never got to know.
Tragically, Troisi died at the early age of 41, just 12 hours after wrapping filming on Il Postino (1991), a film which he starred in and co-wrote. Of course, Il Postino was a major hit and played for US audiences – it even received posthumous Oscar nominations for Troisi’s performance and Screenplay. But the rest of Troisi’s filmography played exclusively in Italy.
Similarly, comedic Italian filmmaker and multi-hyphenate Luca Medici – known by his stage name Checco Zalone – has for his entire career played singularly to Italian audiences. And five of his films are the highest grossing Italian films of all time. But Zalone may have finally secured his international breakthrough.
His latest release Buen Camino which hit theatres on Christmas day in Italy, officially became the highest grossing Italian film of all time. Even better, it beat the all-time top Italian box office champ and American juggernaut – Avatar.
Buen Camino ruled the box office for five weeks dominating the marketplace with a 70% share. In all his previous films, Zalone played the simpleton with a good heart. But here he plays a wealthy and dissolute father searching for his missing daughter in Spain.
But the filmmaker has mastered blending populist comedy with sharp social satire. Something Troisi and Benigni (in the pic below) were well known for, layering their films with melancholy and irony, and often satirized the social conventions of Italian daily life.
The 1984 comedy Non ci resta che piangere starring Troisi and Benigni for example, was one of many precursors to Zalone’s comedy style. In it the two comical geniuses get stranded in 15th century Tuscany, and set out to stop Christopher Columbus from discovering America.
But while the jokes were universal enough, Troisi’s talent couldn’t quite be absorbed without a knowledge of the language. His delivery was everything, as remembered in a scene where a fanatic friar incessantly repeats to Troisi: “Ricordati che devi morire!“. To which an irritated Troisi dismissively replies, “Sì, sì… mò me lo segno, proprio“.
Zalone’s characters are similar, with their mix of good-natured innocence and stupidity, which the actor has trademarked so well. But he’ll need to figure out how to translate his work for global audiences. Because according to his Producer Marco Cohen, of Indiana Production, Buen Camino is “getting showered with more than a dozen requests for international remake rights”.
It’s big news for Zalone and potentially bigger news for an Italian film industry whose prolific and commercially successful comedy content dominates the local market. With Zalone, Italy might finally have its next international comedy star.
Image of Checco Zalone in Buen Camino courtesy of Medusa Film
Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix
