Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Has Filo mentioned this flashback idea of mine? He has? Our storyline has become still richer. I wanted to bring in some real fascist background, you see, because I don’t think Italian cinema has reminded us enough of that extraordinary period, that strange mix of cultural aerobics and disease. You’re going to say The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and I’m going to reply that the film wasn’t really about fascism, it was about an aristocratic family retreating from political reality behind the walls of their estate. A rather hackneyed theme, though always one that gives plenty of opportunity for a nostalgic wallow. The exact nature of the external threat scarcely matters; pretty much anything would have done, from typhoid to totalitarianism. I want that authentic fascist righteousness on its own, unopposed. I want the bourgeois values, the revival of Latin, the purging of foreign phrases from the language, the telefoni bianchi of it all.’

  ‘So how will it fit into your story?’

  ‘OK. Lando’s father who owns the trawler fleet? It was his grandparents who owned this villa. They were thoroughgoing fascists, believed in it utterly. Lando’s father has inherited the house – that’s what we see next door, derelict – and Lando realizes it’s the ideal place for his Green drop-out commune. He’s a blank about Mussolini and the fascist period, of course. No one of his generation knows a thing about all that, or gives a toss.’

  ‘Your idea being?’

  ‘My idea being that of establishing some punchy parallels. I want to show that, contrary to what you might think, there is a deeply bourgeois streak in Green idealism. I also want to show that it takes very little pressure to tip that into fanaticism, whereupon certain behaviours become remarkably fascist. An old theme, you’re thinking. Obviously I don’t want to be polemical. I shall simply let it emerge by means of the metaphor of this villa’s decay: that something of the political stupidity and rankness of 1938 was somehow built into its fabric where it has lingered and re-surfaces in 2003 to corrupt Lando’s idealism.’

  ‘I see. And the erotic, er, excesses?’

  He gives me a shrewd sidelong glance. ‘Those, my dear, are what happen when people lose their sense of purpose. I imagine that was the point of Pasolini’s Salò, only he became sidetracked by his own pathology. As a result the film itself is quite unwatchably disgusting and tells us little about fascism and entirely too much about Pasolini’s fantasies. I can assure you Arrazzato will be on quite a different level.’

  Truthfully, I’m a little surprised by Pacini’s simplistic reading of history, human nature, sexuality, whatever. It reminds me of the sweeping wisdom of our Voyde schoolteachers telling us about the inherent contradictions of capitalism, how it went against man’s natural socialism and therefore could only ever be imposed under duress. The events of 1989 quickly revealed this as dire nonsense even if we hadn’t already known. But when that happened and Voynovia was left without the purposefulness that Soviet ideology had presumably given us, did widespread fucking and abominable debauchery break out on all sides? Sadly, no. For a day or two we held tipsy street parties and sang old national folk songs with tears streaming down our faces. Then we grimly set about trying not to starve.

  But here we are at the sea which lies seductively, twinkling and dimpling like a courtesan welcoming all comers.

  25

  As I already know, this coast is a fairly continuous stretch of sandy beach, arbitrarily divided in the summer season by the differently coloured umbrellas and low plastic fences of various resorts and hotels. Looking up the coast towards Viareggio I can see the nearest gaudy beach furniture about half a kilometre away beyond a corroded fence. This stretches down the beach into the sea and effectively excludes curious holiday-makers from the derelict lots of Pisorno Studios. Southwards, the beach soon thins and frays and ends abruptly in the container terminals, fuel jetties and gantries of Livorno’s industrial port which, owing to their size, loom startlingly close.

  The part of the beach on which our party is standing is a scene of some activity. To our right a bulldozer is heaping rocks and sand to form a low arm running down towards the tide line. Nearby, a shed-like building has been constructed of cement blocks to which a couple of men are applying a rough coat of plaster. Up on its rafters two more men are cobbling together a crude tiled roof.

  ‘OK, so this is where some of the beach stuff will be shot but we have other locations lined up.’

  Pacini is clearly in his element, dressing nature to look like a set that resembles nature. I am irresistibly reminded of Potemkin villages.

  ‘That bulldozer is making one arm of a cove,’ he explains. ‘Just a low spit of land with scrub and a couple of pine trees. That way we won’t be able to see all those beach umbrellas up the coast. This building’s going to be an old fisherman’s house. We’ll age it, patch up some holes in the roof with rubbish, hang some sun-bleached shutters askew, that sort of thing. That will take care of our north-facing shots. The south-facing stuff will be exactly what we can see now: the industrial skyline of today’s Livorno. Very stark, very now as it contrasts with that holiday blue Mediterranean. I like the shape of those cranes and ship hoists. I also love the effects of oil on water. I want occasional rainbow sheen as well as that blunted leaden look, so we’ll arrange some small offshore spills. Nothing polluting, of course. Just light oil that will evaporate within hours.’

  I suddenly feel all this is none of my business. The Potemkin beach, the messing about with history, this mapping of periods onto compass points: it’s all a bit trivial. The only thing that really counts for me in a film is its psychological plausibility. I have never yet been convinced by ultra-realistic sets and an implausible storyline. But occasionally the reverse has been true, and one has willingly overlooked polystyrene rocks or a faint vapour-trail briefly crossing one corner of a Renaissance sky. Pacini meanwhile has wandered over and is giving instructions to the builders. He makes emphatic gestures. The men are sullen, their faces closed. For the first time a doubt is beginning to appear in my mind like the tiny smudge of smoke on the horizon that heralds a huge bulk carrier invisible just beyond. Of course I am still excited about working for Piero Pacini; but now that I have written most of the score and am drawing a salary as one of the team, the original thrill has slightly dulled. One’s career serendipitously moves up several notches and with almost sinister alacrity one adjusts to it. How long before I start demanding a red Pantera of my own and a toy-boy to drive around in it?

  The inner smudge of smoke is what the great Pacini has left in the wake of his new plot outline. I note that his political explanation referred exclusively to this historical flashback of his. Nothing, presumably, is to be changed in the contemporary scenes of the rest of the script as he gave it me six weeks ago. I suppose everything is in the filming and the sound effects and the score; but debauchery on the page could all too easily translate into outtakes from Salò on the screen. When Pacini has finished with the builders I put this point to him as we stroll back towards the villa.

  ‘I quite understand your fears, cara,’ he replies. ‘You must have confidence. You’ve seen my other work. Has it ever yet struck you as vulgar or pathological?’

  ‘Nero’s Birthday treads a pretty thin line in places.’ This is dishonest of me. I have never seen Nero’s Birthday. I am extrapolating from my dudi neighbour’s enthusiasm and from what a shocked Professor Varelius of Voynograd University apparently told Father about the film.

  ‘It’s the line’s thinness in which the true art lies,’ Pacini assures me. ‘Even the Vatican City gave Nero an R rating.’

  ‘R?’

  ‘Ragazzi. Suitable for boys accompanied by a priest.’

  ‘And Mille Piselli?’

  ‘That we filmed almost entirely in the Vatican.’

  The real truth? The real truth is that I have never yet seen a single one of Piero Pacini’s films. Not one. He was just this amazingly famous name, this internationally renowned director who praised my score for Vauli M. How else was a starstruck V
oyde composer supposed to react? Catapulted into Pacini’s glittering circle, I affected a nonchalant sophistication so as not to seem the country hick out of touch with the latest products of the Western art world. I never deliberately pretended to know his work. Familiarity was simply assumed and suddenly it was too late to rectify things. If one was caught up in the great Pacini’s entourage how could one be anything other than a groupie? Well, I’m not about to confess now. By the time Arrazzato is firmly on my CV nobody need ever know.

  ‘But I have to be absolutely clear about the meaning you’re attaching to the debauchery that overtakes your commune,’ I tell him as he stops to pat the plastic cypress tree.

  ‘It’s brilliant,’ he is saying. ‘There’s this company in Rome that will make you any tree you want. You suddenly need a giant redwood for your set, they’ll do you one. But not cheaply. For Brame discrete I needed a hundred cherry trees in bloom. We were shooting in June. Imagine trying to find a cherry orchard blossoming in June. But this company came up with a hundred fibreglass cherry trees so damned realistic they even fooled the bees. I’m sorry, you were saying? Meaning? You want to know the meaning? The psychology of the breakup in Arrazzato?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Nihilism,’ says Pacini fiercely. ‘The meaning is nihilism. The dumb, druggy nothingness of the modern age. In Salò Pasolini was dressing up De Sade as fascism to give hard-core filth the gloss of intellectual respectability. In my view torture and shit-eating are fairly resistant to intellectual fig leaves. My film, by contrast, will show that the only way to counter the sheer vapidity of consumer preoccupations in a world where ideology is extinct is to adopt a principled stand. In this case, Green politics with specific targets: factory ships, dead dolphins, all that stuff. But when this principle, this political will, this cause if you like, becomes eroded from within by extraneous social tensions such as racism, everything collapses back into the jiggy gratifications of our time.’

  This is the first time I have seen Piero anything other than suave and I suddenly find myself thinking that passion suits him better than being the urbane maestro does. It’s surely how he must have been when he was starting out. Plain earnest.

  ‘Arrazzato is about tension,’ he goes on, ‘the effort constantly required not to slump back into the baby-world of self-indulgence where the brain is permanently switched off and the appetites are permanently switched on … Have you got it now?’ He turns to me almost belligerently. ‘It’s bleak. It’s unbelievably bleak. It will be my bleakest film to date. Over these last six weeks it has been defining itself ever more clearly in my mind and it’s your music that has done much of the clarification, Marta.’

  ‘It has?’

  ‘You grasped more of what I was aiming at than I myself knew. That’s what’s so brilliant. You must have picked it up from the script when even the writers themselves hadn’t got it clear despite the script conferences we’ve been having practically every day. You’re a genius, cara.’

  There really hasn’t been enough flattery in my life, I think as we reach the white villa. But there has been quite a lot of pretentiousness recently. Pacini leads the way indoors and, tripping over cables, we enter the room with the verandah. It is empty but decorated.

  ‘We’re still waiting for the period furniture to arrive,’ he explains. ‘To say nothing of the white telephones.’

  There are trompe l’oeil oval shields on the walls painted to look like rounded stone and inscribed with Latin mottoes such as ARX OMNIVM NATIONVM. The one on the wall opposite the balcony is a little larger than the others and surrounded by cherubs bearing it aloft in a swirl of ribbons and flowers. These disgusting creatures are not in the usual Renaissance putti mould with chubby limbs and fat cheeks. Somehow the painter has managed to endow them with a suggestion of incipient musculature like that of toddlers who have come under the ægis of a drill sergeant. The next step in their careers will involve their being fitted with tiny steel helmets. It is brilliantly sinister iconography. The era’s motto is also there in Italian – DIO, PATRIA, FAMIGLIA: those three great intolerables. Pacini, meanwhile, has gone out onto the balcony and is leaning on the balustrade surveying his fake domain.

  ‘But there’s something else I’ve left out,’ he says as I join him. His tone is heavy. ‘I’m telling you this because you’re one of us now and I should be sad indeed if you mentioned it to anybody else, especially journalists.’ He hisses this word venomously and it is clear that the great Piero has had his run-ins with the press. ‘Like any director in Italy these days – like practically any director outside Hollywood, come to that – I’m considerably dependent on American money and distribution, and Americans have ways of making their desires known. “All foreign films start under a handicap,” they told me last year in LA with commendable frankness. “Like, they’re foreign. Now your reputation precedes you, Mr Pasini” – they always call me “Pasini” – “but even so let’s be realistic. You’re never going to fill every last movie seat in Idaho. But the seats you do fill, we want them damp.”’

  Piero Pacini regards me bitterly.

  ‘I imagine it’s much the same everywhere these days,’ I murmur sympathetically. I remember he had started out on the set of A Fistful of Dollars. ‘But even if Italian cinema isn’t what it was, directors like Sergio Leone still had to struggle for funding in their day, didn’t they? And presumably there was money around then.’

  ‘Yes, but even then it was beginning to dry up. Sergio became successful because he had the brilliance to put new life into a clapped-out genre. But now we’re ruined. We’ve been ruined by the giant studios that only make films full of special effects for teenagers. There are no adults left in North America. Even Cinecittà is a shadow of what it was, selling off backlots and props like crazy. It’s tragic. So when those bastards in LA said they wanted damp seats, some sort of orgy scene in Arrazzato became inevitable. Our task is to make it a meaningful orgy, OK? So now you know the deal.’

  And all I can think amid these hard-luck stories of an industry’s demise is the paramount importance of prolonging Father’s ignorance of this project until it’s safely too late. The very phrase ‘a meaningful orgy’ echoes in my head. I try to comfort myself with the reflection that any blame for a film’s content can hardly attach to the person who wrote the soundtrack. Plenty of films are let down by lousy scores but nobody ever accuses the composer of having been complicit in the moral tone of the screenplay, do they?

  The real problem Piero Pacini leaves me with is that, at least when it comes to social arguments, he seems not to be very intelligent. Can it be that the eminent director is a bit thick? He appears to think that when idealists collapse only nihilism remains. But just because a few members of a supposedly Green commune turn out also to be racist, drunk or lascivious, I should have thought it hardly invalidates environmentalist arguments against the damage done by commercial fishing. Oh well, that’s showbiz. I’m far more convinced by the financial bind the man’s in. That’s an altogether better pretext for an orgy.

  26

  Between completing my score and trips down to the set I haven’t seen anything of Gerry this last week. Seen, no; heard, definitely. From time to time I’ve been aware of noises off: truck engines, bangings, hammerings, and floating over all the hysterical falsetto arias that seem to accompany my eccentric neighbour’s every endeavour. Since this voice of his is the one sound my life up in these hills and the film have in common, the two seem ever more associated. To that extent, though quite unknown to him, Gerry is already part of Pisorno Studios and Arrazzato.

  It’s curious how abstracted one can become. These last few days I must occasionally have glanced unseeingly out of the kitchen window; but not until a sudden burst of riveting am I now moved to look out and notice for the first time a large fence that has appeared surprisingly close to my house. At this moment Gerry’s head and shoulders appear above the end panel. He is in his steel erector’s kit: I recognize the yellow helmet. Fo
r some reason he is holding an obviously weighty machine gun in both hands. He reaches far over the top of the fence with it and turns it to take aim awkwardly at the wood on my side. Suddenly there is a distant sound of collapse and he lurches, hanging half over. His helmet falls off. Simultaneously the machine gun fires, rather to his surprise, I should say, and he drops it with a yell. It crashes to the ground, trailing behind it a cable. Meanwhile Gerry has become remarkably red in the face and is thrashing about as he hangs. I fling open the back door in alarm.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I ask with neighbourly concern. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ he says, struggling some more. There is banging on the far side of the fence as from a flailing boot. ‘I, er, things are pretty much under control, thanks. I seem to have dropped the nail gun, though. Have it up in a jiffy.’ He tugs one-handedly at the cable. The gun on the ground twitches. ‘Better stand back, Marta,’ he warns. ‘It goes off very easily. Incredibly easily.’

  ‘Why don’t you just come over this side and fetch it? You look as though you need a rest, anyway. Come and have some delicacies from Voynovia.’

  More banging. ‘Most kind,’ he gasps. He seems preoccupied and his face is congested with effort. I can’t think why he goes on hanging over the fence until I realize he must have kicked his step ladder over and can’t reach the ground. Really, he must be extraordinarily unfit if he can’t lower himself back down. The fence is barely two metres high.

  ‘Er, I’m sort of stuck, Marta. My boot won’t, well, I think I might have shot myself in the foot.’

  ‘In the foot, Gerry?’

  ‘Damn silly thing.’

  I walk around the end of the fence. There is a step ladder lying on its side on the grass and Gerry’s left boot is indeed fixed to the panel halfway up.