I basilischi

In a small village in the South of Italy Antonio, a young Law student and the son of a notary, spends his long days with his friends Francesco and Sergio. Those three are both intolerant and part of the underdeveloped mentality of the village. They wonder about, try to flirt with girls, fight with their parents, think about the things they don’t do and dream romantic and imaginative love adventures. The same old stories in the same old places. They are surrounded by a lifeless reality, only shaken by a few “events” which seem such big news: a wife leaving her husband and a woman who commits suicide because of family reasons. A great opportunity knocks on Antonio’s door: he goes to Rome with his relatives and there he would have the chance to change, to break with the hesitation and apathy of his ordinary existence. But once he gets back, it is like nothing ever happened. He comes back to his regular life.

The story of I basilischi was the following one. Franca Santi was travelling around cathedrals in Apulia and she called me full of enthusiasm. So I went with a friend, Bibi Tagliaferri, to meet Franca in Spinazzola and we ended the tour together. It was my first time in Apulia, I had never visited my father’s village and so we went to Palazzo San Gervaso. I was very impressed by the place. It was small, on one of the tops of the Murge; ancient and with a really “bourgeois” path, it looked out to the Tavoliere delle Puglie and it was on the border between Apulia and Basilicata. I kept that in mind even later, when we left towards Sicily, exactly on the 29th of April, in Portella delle Ginestre, where Francesco Rosi was about to shoot the slaughter of the 1st of May for his film Salvatore Giuliano. Nello Santi, Franca’s husband, was the producer of the film. There on those mountains, during the scene of that great movie, on that exact date, while we were waiting for them to shoot against the farmers, I spoke to Tullio Kezich about Palazzo San Gervaso.
It was an exciting atmosphere, it was during one of the many downtime of cinema that I told him how impressed I was about the South, that village, that kind of middle-class. It was a special South, without any passion. “Why don’t you write about it?” he said. I wrote it and the miracle happened. Olmi and Soffiantini, who were in the 22 Dicembre company with Kezich, fell in love with the idea that Tullio brought them, but everything would have drowned without Nello Santi, (the) Galatea.

The idea of taking the responsibility of a film came up during a journey around Apulia, watching a certain small-town middle-class. Its bourbon laziness both intrigued me and annoyed me. So I thought to see through a camera how they speak, they laugh, they “loosen up” in certain areas of Southern Italy where there still are a contemplation and a decay that almost remind of Oblomov.
I probably felt an attraction for all of that, because of my optimistic, energetic, lively nature compared to the slumber, the apathy and the submission of those people. I love the South (I was born in Rome; my family is from Switzerland) very much; so my contemplation is critic: not for the sake of it, in an aesthetic way. (...)
In this case, the actors had to be one with their original environment. After six months of research for the main roles I found one in Bari, one in Naples and one in Rome; they were all Southern men, very skilled and disciplined. I chose them because I wanted to see on their faces the “sleepiness” of the South: 150 years of Spanish influence and 90 years of bourbon influence.

I just reported real and objective facts. It would have been absurd to make irony... for what reason then? On the contrary, I looked at things with a certain pain. I was actually sorry that the topics were sometimes pretty heavy. And if the film often makes people laugh is because the situations were actually funny and ridiculous, not because I made them so. I want it to be very clear.

Regia, soggetto e sceneggiatura: Lina Wertmüller.
Aiuto regia: Bibi Tagfiaferri, Franca Santi.
Director of photography: Gianni Di Venanzo.
Operatore alla macchina: Pasquale De Santis.
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni.
Music: Ennio Morricone.
Cast and characters: Antonio Petruzzi (Antonio), Stefano Satta Flores (Francesco), Sergio Ferrannino (Sergio), Luigi Barbieri (padre di Antonio), Flora Carabella (Luciana Bonfanti), Mimmina Quirico (zia di Antonio), Enzo Di Vecchia (l'amico), Marisa Omodei (Cicci D'Andrea), Manlio Blois (il proprietario terriero), Enzo Mitolo, Rosanna Santoro, Rosetta Palumbo.
Production company: 22 Dicembre-Galatea.
Italian distribution: Cineriz.