A pure formality, from Tornatore's film to the Bellini Theater in Naples

A pure formality, the famous film by Giuseppe Tornatore, becomes a theatrical show, staged at the Teatro Bellini in Naples

In a room of a squalid Police Command, a man searches for his memory, trying to tell another man about his past. A pure formality, film directed by Giuseppe Tornatore and released in the 1994, it is a journey to discover themselves and their lives. The film is considered one of the finest ever by Tornatore and it featured Gérard Depardieu and Roman Polanski with a very young Sergio Rubini.

“Men are eternally doomed to forget the unpleasant things in their life; and the more unpleasant they are, the sooner they are about to forget them ”. This is what he writes in one of his novels protagonist Onoff, which in the long night of A pure formality is anxiously trying to remember a past that perhaps wanted to forget. A crime has been committed, and the writer Onoff is accused.

The film from which thetheatrical adaptation of Glauco Mauri he presented already, as the director has said, of theatrical potentialities:

Already the film has its own structure suspended between cinema and theater and this has helped me a lot in my work. And as in lucky "encounters", the story so beautifully told in the film made unexpected emotions sprout in me that became more and more mine. A work is all the more valid the more it gives an interpreter the possibility of discovering human and poetic nuances hidden in it. I tried to revive all the dramatic force of the screenplay by modifying those parts that were presented with overly cinematic connotations, while at the same time preserving that intensity that envelops us from the beginning in its mysterious intertwining. The story remains obscure until its shocking epilogue where the torn pieces of a life are composed in an unexpected and moving serenity: a radical overturning of what looked like a thriller. […] Cinema has its expressive riches, theater has others that are its own. And on a stage, in our case, the word takes on a value not only as a story but also as an invitation to imagination and questions. Questions necessary for man to help him try to understand that sometimes wonderful and sometimes terrible, but always fascinating journey that is life.