I had never seen this film before but recently saw it as part of a library film series. Directed by Michael Radford it earned five Academy award nominations and won Best Original Dramic Score for Luis Enriquez Bacalov. This was a low budget film but went on to become the highest grossing non-English language film for a long time. shot on location on the Italian islands of Salina and Procida and wonderfully photographed by Franco Di Gialomo this is the story of an unemployed and unmarried man Mario Ruoppolo (Massimo Troisi) reaching middle age years and is offered a small job as a postman with only one customer, the exiled Chilean communist poet Pablo Neruda (Phillipe Noiret) who is staying on the island. Mario and Pablo develop a warm friendship which leads a new confident Mario into writing poetry himself to woo local beauty, the barmaid Beatrice Russo (Maria Grazia Cucinotta). Basically a two actor film with a great cast in Troisi, Noiret and Cucinotta with great support in small roles from Linda Moretti as Neruda's mistress Donna Rosa and Renato Scarpa as Mario's boss. Nice costume design by Gianna Giss and production design by Lorenzo Baraldi. A fictionalized account of a brief 1952 stay on the island of Capri by Neruda written by Radford, Troisi, Furio and Giacomo Scarpelli and Anna Pavigano from a story by Antonio Skármeta set in Argentina during Neruda's exile there. This is a touching story and very well rendered. It is visually artistic and dramatically poetic with touches of smart, light comedy. It is painful to watch knowing that it's star, Troisi, filmed this against doctor's orders and ultimately ended up dying of a heart attack immediately after the principal filming. You can see him sweating in almost every scene even when he is not riding his bicycle and none of the other actors are sweating. For his health the director should have shut down or slowed production or recast him. A lot of work went into this for a small film and it paid off on the screen and at the box office. I would recommend this and give it an 8.5 out of 10.
Review of The Postman
