«He is not affected by time» Sgarbi Sgarbi- Corriere.it

«To distract myself from the obligatory celebrations for Vittorio, I invented the need for a film that testified to this double birthday party, taking me out». With much love, Elizabeth Sgarbi thus explains the birth of his 70th film «Vittorio in a time out of time» which debuts at the Turin Film Festival on Tuesday 29th.

It is the cinema he prefers, the anthropological one, art and man forever united, Romanian carers, priests of the river or the works and days of the photographer Nino Migliori. Here is the resumption of the double party, which began on May 8, 2022 aboard the Stradivari motor ship along the Po and ended two days later on the mainland in Francesco Micheli’s house. Comedian’s fun, a cocktail of worldliness, cynicism, intelligence. But always a lot of people and non-obligatory joy, with Elisabetta whirling around with her fuchsia drape, giving and taking away the floor, together with the director of photography Andrés Arce Maldonado and her assistant director Eugenio Lio. It is therefore fitting that, on Saturday in Chiavari, she was awarded the prize of Ambassador of the Word, considering the 24 very intense years of the Milanesiana which often crosses borders: after all, Elisabetta has the favors of temporal power, and also of the spiritual one, since the Pope made her a member of the Insigne Academy of Fine Arts. The cast of the invitations is colossal, a Guinness book of records, but the Sgarbi, while the ship goes and proceeds on the Po, an ancestral reminder of the roots, moves kidnapping the guests away from the mad crowd, between Shammah and Colasanti, Colle and Morgan, Andreose and Dolce, Postiglione and Cairo, Valsecchi and Sallusti, Ovadia and Sacchi, Lio and Toscani, an infinite list of possible relationships and human and cultural variations on the theme «Vittorio». Excused absences on the motorboat Antonio Rezza and his son Giordano, kindly crucified by his father in the film Christ in the throatbrilliant presences in the the end.

Elisabetta, while Extraliscio occupy the soundtrackmoves in fuchsia like Ariel in The Tempest, which means that the celebrated 70-year-old brother, memorizing Shakespeare, is the wizard who, like Prospero, causes hurricanes and enchantments to explode, with many possibilities for metaphor.

Many friends, moved by Vittorio’s vitality, says the sister: journalists and publishers, politicians and ministers, drivers and artists, daughters and relatives, doctors, dentists and gallery owners, entrepreneurs, creditors and ex-lovers (Elizabeth dixit, equalizing debts), dedicate a word to the birthday boy, a testimony, a memory: a madeleine in a thousand pieces. In the title Vittorio is after all out of time, like Proust in Piperno’s book.

Elizabeth also intervenes on the elasticity of space and time, who has made many types of cinema, observing and filming art, nature, man, perhaps all together: «Vittorio, like our mother, has never suffered from time, he has always multiplied it, subverting social and biological: the fury of life is terror of the void. With the film, I wanted to express my being there even when I’m not there, playing down the celebration but at the same time fixing this anniversary where I didn’t quite know how many real friends there were and how many had come to be there». Do you hate and love holidays? «No, I hate parties and therefore I had to have my own way, creating a distance between me and the guests, forcing them to be active and not passive, thinking about the questions, all done with a lot of understatement and without anyone perceiving it. Especially as I teased with my fuchsia and orange veils even in the second party. You say a sophisticated comedy? I would not have thought of it, but I really like the definition. I adopt her.”