In Memory By I’M Italian Team
Massimo Troisi
I'M Italian Issue 11 January 2021
I
t is futile but understandable to speculate how the career might have turned out of one who died much too young. The Neapolitan papers this week spent some time doing that, true, but generally just paid heartfelt tribute to Massimo Troisi, from San Giorgio (near Naples), who died in 1994 but who, this week, would have turned 50. Troisi made his first film, in 1981, Ricomincio da tre (a pun on the expression Ricomincio da zero —I'm
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starting over— (thus, roughly, I'm Starting Over Somewhere in the Middle), and his last film, shortly before his death, Il Postino (The Postman, probably his best-known film abroad. Perhaps only Roberto Benigni, among recent Italian comics, strikes you the same way Troisi does, as having that quality of comic genius worthy of mentioning in the same breath as the great Totò. (Benigni and Troisi appear in one film together, in 1984: Non ci resta che piangere (There's nothing left to do but cry) where they are transported in time back to the 1400s and even meet Leonardo da Vinci and give him some pointers.) Troisi generates the same type of “Do you remember that episode…?” —stories that characterize conversations about all great comics. (Do you remember that scene of Laurel and Hardy moving the piano up the
long flight of steps? Of course you do.) There are scores of those about Totò and, by now, a lot of them about Troisi. Yes, I remember that scene where Troisi plays the wrong Mary (!), not the mother of Jesus, but another Mary in “a city of Galilee named Nazareth” whose daily routine gets interrupted by an inept Herald Angel who keeps barging onto the stage with “Hearken! Mary…the Lord is with thee…thou shalt conceive…” Troisi spends the skit trying to convince the angel that he/she/ it has come to the wrong house and the wrong Mary. Joseph’s wife is over on the next street. There is not the least sense of irreverence in the performance, either. Troisi’s language was that of Naples, with virtually no attempt to modify his difficult native dialect to a more standard Italian for the benefit of those who might have difficulty understanding him —audiences in northern Italy, for example.