If you have seen the film, have any info on it or a DVD or VHS copy please contact me.
Cast | Notes | Pictures | Summary - Official | Quotes

Cast

Written & Directed by Ugo Gregoretti

Crew

Produced - Giuseppe Giovannini
Original Music - Fiorenzo Carpi
Cinematography - Pierluigi Santi
Sound Engineer - Marco Streccioni
Sets & Costumes - Ivan Stefanutti
Camera Operator - Chicca Ungaro
Construction - Mauro Bonanni
Music - Fiorenzo Carpi
Production by CINELIFE s.r.l. Roma

Notes

• Easily Malcolm's rarest film. It's never been released on home video, had a general release or has been seen outside of Italy and the director owns the only copy.

• Premiered at the Festival EuropaCinema89 in Viareggio on November 21, 1989.

• 35mm, 111 minutes

• In English the title is "Musical May", a name also attributed to Il Maestro, which causes confusion to make some think it's the same film, it is not.

• A soundtrack has been released on CD in 1990.

• Was shown at an Italian festival in Feb 2007.

Gregoretti's Personal Note

    "Maggio Musicale" represents my opera in the field of movies - before senility set in, written and filmed between 1989 and 1990, after a long period of "movie abstinence" during which I was involved in TV and theatre. I was 60 years old and my last feature film "Le belle famiglie" was 25 years old, but I couldn’t forgive myself for giving up on cinema. In spite of good results achieved in the other form of performing, I thought (and I think) cinema is the most lively, touching, involving and modern expression of telling art. I escaped and left cinema because I was convinced I was not able to do it. Convinced by the critics who destroyed my "omicron" in which I believed in a lot and which has been generously rehabilitated by new and old fans. Convinced by the audience, certainly where my films were shown there was not always a full house. Besides the dishonor of my TV provenience at that time (and still nowadays) I was considered almost  infamous in the film world which was hanging over me.
    In the end I ran away for years and after lots of suffering I considered myself unable to do movies. Until one day, a friend asked me to deeply analyze the reason of a such impediment, which he defined "hysterical sterility" (which comes from "hysterical pregnancy" i.e. imaginary). He encouraged me to prove it and I, unbelievably, followed his suggestion. I sat at an old café table in Cuneo and I wrote the film script of Maggio Musicale in 8 days as an autobiographical story. - Ugo Gregoretti

Pictures

Quotes

Q: Is it like a time travel piece?

A: Oh yeah! It's a very nice film. It starts out at the opera. The Maggio Musicale is the Magical May, the Music of May in Florence. It's the operas and everything of Puccini. You are seeing this family dressed in the 1940s period. You see them in the box and there's this young kid mouthing to the singer, so he's obviously into the music so much. There's other kids and his mom and dad. They get up and leave at the interval and leave him there. He gets up and there are two doors at the back of the box and he doesn't go out the exit, he goes out the other door and that door brings him to the present day and there's a press conference going on with the director of the opera who in fact is me. It's modern day and the kid is me when I was a child who is meeting himself as an older man. I go who are you, what do you want? He's giving this talk to all these rather sophisticated types. The kid is standing there because he gets a feeling of knowing what is going on, but he doesn't really know. Then he kind of does know. It's the most amazing thing that goes on. He's separated from his wife and this and it's a fantastic story. They had really wonderful opera singers, Shirley Verrett who is one of the best opera singers came and did a piece. Then I take him around Florence showing him these masterpieces in these churches that people don't even know exis

Summary - Official

    In 1946, the wounds of the recent war are still open and evident. Young Checco and his family are sitting in a big theatre in Rome, watching Puccini's "Bohème". The boy listens to the opera very intently and, at the end of the first act, while everybody gets up to go to the foyer, he remains seated, writing on his notebook. At the beginning of the second act, his seat is empty.
    More that forty years later, in another theatre, the Pergola in Florence, director Pier Francesco Ferraioli is rehearsing the "Bohème" for the oncoming Maggio Musicale. He has just finished talking to a group of journalists when Checco suddenly materializes, dressed in this old style clothes, still clutching his notebook and a 1946 opera program in his hands: he has been thrown in another dimension, and the man before his eyes is himself, forty years older, a successful opera director with a wife, a lover, four children and a few regrets..."

This page © 2005-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net