Puccini and the Young Girl
Sunday, November 16, 2008 at 8pm

The Venice Film Festival selection, shown in collaboration with NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerillo-Marimò

“The challenging work of Paolo Benvenuti has never been so beautiful…A discerning filmmaker-investigator, Pisan-born Benvenuti (former student of Rossellini and Straub-Huillet) was not interested in making just another biopic for music lovers. Instead, he explores a rather more private chapter in the life of the composer [Giacomo Puccini] (played by orchestra conductor Riccardo J. Moretti): the suicide of his maid Doria Manfredi (Tania Squillario). Long believed to be his lover, the woman poisoned herself in 1909, at a time when the musician was composing ‘The Girl of the Golden West’…

More than the work on the language (carefully reproduced Italian and Tuscan dialect from the start of the last century), what strikes viewers most is the faithfulness of the director’s images, lensed by Giovanni Battista Marras, to the old-fashioned methods of the time...This is to the point where the film is almost bereft of dialogue: only music and traditional songs (often diegetic and played live) are blended with the sounds of nature, highlighting the infinite resources of the audiovisual form.”—Gabriele Barcaro, Cineuropa

Puccini and the Young Girl / Puccini e la fanciulla
Paolo Benvenuti, Italy, 2008; 84m