MOVIE REVIEWS : A SPLENDID ADAPTATION OF ‘HENRY IV’

Marco Bellochio, whose films are as beautiful to behold as they are often harrowing to watch, is the ideal film maker to bring the plays of his fellow Italian Luigi Pirandello to the screen.

Bellochio’s splendid free adaptation of Pirandello’s “Henry IV” (at the Cineplex) reveals that the playwright’s preoccupation with the impossibility of the individual to grasp his true identity meshes perfectly with the film maker’s related fascination with destructiveness and dependency within relationships.

And who but Marcello Mastroianni to play a contemporary Italian nobleman who for 20 years has lived in a medieval castle as the 11th-Century Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire?

In his youth, the nobleman (played by Luciano Bartoli, whose resemblance to Mastroianni is astonishing) had dressed for a carnival as Henry IV because he was smitten with a lush, dark-eyed beauty (Latou Chardons) gowned as the emperor’s great love, Matilda of Tuscany. Thrown from a horse during the festivities, he awakens believing he is the Holy Roman emperor.

Two decades later, the nobleman lives frozen in 1064, still holding court, still doing penance in the hope that Pope Gregory VII will grant him a pardon for defying him. Like their master, the male servants dress in period, but backstairs they live in the present, amusingly playing soccer and reading the paper in tights, tunic and pointy caps and shoes. Their womenfolk tear up mattresses to spin cotton to weave cloth for their authentic attire.

To this bizarre yet largely serene household comes the nobleman’s nephew (Gianfelice Imparato) with a group of people to make one last attempt to restore him to sanity. In the party are that dark-eyed beauty, now an elegantly mature marchesa (now played by Claudia Cardinale), her lover (Paolo Bonacelli), the marchesa’s daughter (Chardons) and a psychiatrist (Leopoldo Trieste). The daughter will now don the costume of Matilda of Tuscany, while her mother will pretend she’s Matilda’s mother.

In the ensuing confrontations the central question that emerges is whether the nobleman is really mad after all--and if not, why is he living as he is? In watching “Henry IV” one cannot help but be reminded of Bavaria’s “Mad Ludwig,” who was probably more eccentric than crazy, and Ludwig’s beloved castle Neueschwanstein. The ambiguity surrounding Ludwig also surrounds Mastroianni’s Henry IV.

Bellochio’s “Henry IV” (rated PG-13 because it is too complex for most youngsters), which he adapted with the help of the distinguished veteran screenwriter Tonino Guerra, has a rich, shadowy look and a romantic quality heightened by Astor Piazzola’s lush score. There’s such an easy flow to it that it never seems a filmed play. It is marked by superb ensemble playing but is rightly dominated by Mastroianni, whose resources as an actor seem limitless.