Abel Ferrara’s Padre Pio is a fusion of two souls, each as rough-hewn and fragmentary as the other. Set in the immediate aftermath of World War I in the Italian village of San Giovanni Rotondo and filmed on location, it’s partly a biopic about the Catholic saint Pio of Pietrelcina (Shia Labeouf), for whom every waking moment seems a dark night of the soul. But it’s also a dramatization of the struggle between the landed gentry and the soldiers who return disillusioned from the war, culminating in violence after a stolen election.
Ferrara and co-writer Maurzio Braucci, instead of treating Catholicism and Marxism as antagonistic, find resonance in their iconography, their shared valorization of the downtrodden, and the zeal of their adherents—as well as their crises of faith. It isn’t heresy to say that Padre Pio is a spiritual successor to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St.
Ferrara and co-writer Maurzio Braucci, instead of treating Catholicism and Marxism as antagonistic, find resonance in their iconography, their shared valorization of the downtrodden, and the zeal of their adherents—as well as their crises of faith. It isn’t heresy to say that Padre Pio is a spiritual successor to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St.
- 5/30/2023
- by William Repass
- Slant Magazine
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Of the many questions one might ask when watching Abel Ferrara’s clunky portrayal of the legendary and controversial early 20th-century Italian friar, Padre Pio, the main one has to be: Why, oh why Abel, did you decide to make the movie in English?
Granted, Ferrara probably felt more comfortable working in his native tongue — as likely did Shia Labeouf, who seems fully committed to his pious role, sporting a beard that’s bigger than the Book of Psalms itself. But the Bronx-born director has been living in Rome for a while now, and had he chosen Italian for this story of a priest caught between his alleged healing powers and his visions of Lucifer, between the rise of fascism and a growing communist revolt in a small village, this bungled drama may have seemed a little more credible.
Instead, Ferrera surrounded Labeouf...
Of the many questions one might ask when watching Abel Ferrara’s clunky portrayal of the legendary and controversial early 20th-century Italian friar, Padre Pio, the main one has to be: Why, oh why Abel, did you decide to make the movie in English?
Granted, Ferrara probably felt more comfortable working in his native tongue — as likely did Shia Labeouf, who seems fully committed to his pious role, sporting a beard that’s bigger than the Book of Psalms itself. But the Bronx-born director has been living in Rome for a while now, and had he chosen Italian for this story of a priest caught between his alleged healing powers and his visions of Lucifer, between the rise of fascism and a growing communist revolt in a small village, this bungled drama may have seemed a little more credible.
Instead, Ferrera surrounded Labeouf...
- 9/2/2022
- by Jordan Mintzer
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Pietro Marcello in front of an Andrei Tarkovsky Stalker and Satyajit Ray Apu Trilogy posters: “For me Martin Eden is a very contemporary character. So my objective was to span over the entire 20th century …” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden star Luca Marinelli (Andrea in Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty) in the title role won the Best Actor Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival where the film had its world première. Based on the 1909 novel by Jack London, with a screenplay co-written with Maurizio Braucci, Martin Eden, shot by Alessandro Abate and Francesco Di Giacomo, represents the 20th Century unlike any other film. Jessica Cressy, Vincenzo Nemolato, Marco Leonardi, Carlo Cecchi, Denise Sardisco and Carmen Pommella feature in the excellent ensemble surrounding our troubled hero.
Pietro Marcello on Luca Marinelli in Martin Eden: “We do love Martin Eden in the first part of the film because he's authentic,...
Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden star Luca Marinelli (Andrea in Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty) in the title role won the Best Actor Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival where the film had its world première. Based on the 1909 novel by Jack London, with a screenplay co-written with Maurizio Braucci, Martin Eden, shot by Alessandro Abate and Francesco Di Giacomo, represents the 20th Century unlike any other film. Jessica Cressy, Vincenzo Nemolato, Marco Leonardi, Carlo Cecchi, Denise Sardisco and Carmen Pommella feature in the excellent ensemble surrounding our troubled hero.
Pietro Marcello on Luca Marinelli in Martin Eden: “We do love Martin Eden in the first part of the film because he's authentic,...
- 10/11/2019
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
American novelist Jack London was an active proponent of socialism, his writing offering self-reflexive deconstructions of their values within distinct, incongruous, futuristic worlds, temporally far-flung but with technology and attitudes contemporaneous to the turn of the century. These qualities are prevalent throughout Martin Eden, Pietro Marcello’s fantastic second fiction feature that stands as a spellbinding synthesis of both London’s speculative ideas and Marcello’s documentarian instincts, capturing the clairvoyance and spirit of London’s writing via Marcello’s sensibilities as a predominantly non-fiction filmmaker.
Eden follows the eponymous protagonist through pre-World War II Italy, changed from the novel’s pre-wwi America. Despite his undereducation, the young sailor—imbued with wily charm by a mesmerizing Luca Marinelli—is a promising writer, though he’s constantly struggling to make ends meet, frequently unemployed because of firm commitment to his rights as a worker. When not at sea, he’s either...
Eden follows the eponymous protagonist through pre-World War II Italy, changed from the novel’s pre-wwi America. Despite his undereducation, the young sailor—imbued with wily charm by a mesmerizing Luca Marinelli—is a promising writer, though he’s constantly struggling to make ends meet, frequently unemployed because of firm commitment to his rights as a worker. When not at sea, he’s either...
- 10/1/2019
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
By the time a publicist signals that my turn has come, director Pietro Marcello has just wrapped his last roundtable interview of the day, and slouches on a sofa at the Excelsior Hotel, peering at the terrace a few steps away from us, and the Adriatic Sea, sprawling bright and calm further down. It’s the midway point of the 76th Venice Film Festival, and the thick late summer air above the Lido is packed with the noise of people besieging the red carpet. A self-taught documentarian (Diy credentials he would proudly and rightfully boast in our interview), Marcello first bowed on the Lido in 2007, when his Crossing the Line found a slot in the Horizons sidebar, before cementing his name in 2009 with The Mouth of the Wolf. Eight years since his 2011 documentary The Silence of Pelesjan world premiered on the Lido—again in the Horizons program—and four since...
- 10/1/2019
- MUBI
Jack London — an avowed socialist who found himself struggling to reconcile his political ideals with his personal success — intended for “Martin Eden” to be a damning critique of the individualism that spurred his fame. “White Fang” and “The Call of the Wild” had earned the low-born writer an invitation into high society, but he struggled to square the untamed working man he was with the celebrated author he’d suddenly become; still at heart the same person he had always been, London was disgusted to see how differently the ruling class now looked at someone they once despised. What self-serving bullshit! Why should anyone beg for a member of the elite to throw them their own private lifeline when all of the workers could band together and raise everyone to the same level?
And so London scraped out a book about a scruffy wanderer who falls in love with a rich girl,...
And so London scraped out a book about a scruffy wanderer who falls in love with a rich girl,...
- 9/2/2019
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
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