The spirit of Borges and the soul of Naples. Interview with Marco Chiappetta

Last Thursday at Moretti’s Sacher, in torrid Rome where if July is hot it seems our fault, he projected “Saint Lucia”, director’s debut Marco Chiappetta, story of a dreamlike and Borgesian Naples, of a blind protagonist and his nostalgic return, narration in an odd sauce of a city that never tires when and if it takes leave of clichés. Born in 1991, born on the bourgeois hill of Vomero like Paolo Sorrentino, Chiappetta studied cinema in Paris where on the Seine he closed his eyes imagining he was walking along the domestic waterfront, already anticipating the film he wanted to make.

He made it beyond his expectations and yet shares the curious fate of the natives of the nineties, who wonder when the current forty-year-olds (and more) will stop considering themselves holders of endless youth to leave a little for them too, in their twenties and thirties , how young they really are.

Will her generation be able to express itself? Or will you stay behind the white-haired Törless?

Unfortunately, very little is done in Italy to give a voice to thirty-year-olds. If at forty they still call themselves boys, those my age are considered children. In cinema it’s even worse: the more I think about it, the more miraculous I think I made my debut so early. We risk losing the voice of a generation, while it would be nice to know what we think of the world. And let us tell you about it.

What is the possible story?

At least on Naples it is necessary to look for new angles, outside the positive or negative stereotypes that persist in commercial literature and in TV series. You can redo the play, but it won’t be up to Troisi. You can redo De Filippo, but it will hurt you. You can talk about the Camorra, but after ‘Gomorra’ it’s difficult to create an original imagery on the world of crime. Yet, there are many aspects of the city that have remained hidden and unexplored. Those who free themselves from stereotypes will find many.

However, when Pistoletto’s Venus of Rags went up in flames, there was immediate self-flagellation indignation, the sociological outcry that died away with embarrassment as soon as it was discovered that the culprit was a drifter, universal like any madness.

It was a classic example of settling on the easy story: street urchins, the underworld, the connivance of citizens with evil, what we don’t deserve and so on. The reality is instead more complex, and to tell Naples like New York or Paris you have to overcome laziness, abandoning stale formulas. Sometimes I have the impression that the last ones to know how to narrate the city are almost all dead. I feel like an orphan, aware that I grew up in a poorer cultural context than our parents.

Is there a Neapolitan writer on your top shelf?

There is ‘The Gold of Naples’ by Giuseppe Marotta. His prose still conveys a very poetic idea and the film that was made from it retains only a few reminiscences. Marotta impresses me much more than ‘Mortally Wounded’ by La Capria. And yet Borges’s inspiration had the most impact on my film. Its Buenos Aires. The relationship with blindness. The nostalgia of childhood in the city.

Nostalgia is a theme that has been transfused from a posthumous novel by Ermanno Rea into Martone’s latest film, released after his but arriving earlier in theaters. Why is the story of the return so frequent?

Distance and return are central themes of Neapolitan song, literature and cinema. Sorrentino’s ‘It was the hand of God’ is also a nostalgic film of memories. I grew up in his own neighborhood, I couldn’t help but be influenced by him as a director and I worked with the team and with actors he worked with, such as Andrea Renzi and Renato Carpentieri. But I feel more inspired by the French: Cocteau, Truffaut, Alain Resnais. But above all, and first of all, I try to express a personal poetic.

Vomero is little told compared to the city. There is the impression that a long-standing cultural ban deems a bourgeois context less worthy of narration than the popular ones.

In fact, I plan to shoot my next film there, between piazza Vanvitelli and via Palizzi. Places that hide the shadows of the old liberty behind the windows, bucolic corners of the lost countryside and some dreamlike atmospheres. It is a city within a city, which emerges if we abandon the usual dichotomy between heaven and hell, terrible criminal suburbs and sun-sea-pizza. The Vomerese perspective has a further visual advantage for a director: from here one embraces the overview of Naples, from the old one to the business center with the skyscrapers, which make it a place like an Asian or American metropolis. My goal is to make it a state of mind, to make it a background for transfigured and universal feelings. I’m not interested in showing the already said. Neither Vesuvius nor noisy alleys, rather a journey into places that have not been seen on the big screen. A metaphysical look among the ghosts.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Like subtle presences that manifest themselves in half-sleep. Voices that as long as they exist in our heads we can believe they also exist in reality.