Oscar Goes to the Five Corners of the Globe

This year’s best picture nominees represent an unprecedented sweep of the world, with each one having been set or filmed in a different country: “The Postman (Il Postino)” in Italy, “Babe” in Australia, “Braveheart” in Scotland, “Sense and Sensibility” in England and “Apollo 13” in the United States. So we dispatched correspondents to each site to find out how filming affected the area, how the finished film touched the locals--and who everyone will be rooting for on Monday night.

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Life on this sun-washed speck off the Neapolitan coast, an unassuming island of narrow streets, red and ochre houses and citrus groves, has changed little during the last 40 years. Outclassed for international tourism by flashy neighbors like Capri and Ischia, Procida lives off more homely tourism, fishing and shipping.

But a spotlight beamed into the lives of Procidani two years ago. “The Postman (Il Postino),” the film from Italy on this year’s Oscar list, was mainly shot here, an event that directly involved at least 30 of the 12,000 islanders but has touched all of them. The glory of the five Oscar nominations is also posthumous recognition of the extraordinary performance of Massimo Troisi, who played the poetic postman. Troisi suffered from heart problems and died at 41 on June 4, 1994, a day after the final take.

Troisi, who headed an international film troupe with French actor Philippe Noiret and English director Michael Radford, saw the island as the scene of one of his life’s ambitions--to film “The Postman of Pablo Neruda,” a novel by Chilean author Antonio Skarmeta.

Islanders, suspicious of show-biz mainlanders when filming started in May 1994, soon became friendly collaborators, says Antonio Di Sauro, a Naples resident who organized locations, facilities and extras.

Down in the old port of Coricella, where the bar scenes were shot, fishermen sit, talk and mend their nets, just as they did for Radford’s camera.

“Me, I’m a fisherman,” says 71-year-old Salvatore Gentile. “What was I in the film? A fisherman!”

Gentile’s fisherman friends, also film extras, remember the tired, quiet figure of Troisi with affection.

“He was really one of us--there was no presumption, no pretension about him,” says Vincenzo Piro, the island’s mayor in the film and, in real life, owner of the bar in the port used by the crew and cast. (Up the hill behind the port, the post office that so memorably advertised for a literate postman is the local greengrocer.)

“We brought Troisi round to the port here from his villa by that boat there,” says Piro, pointing to a fishing boat. “He was too weak to walk far; he could only work for a short time.” Troisi’s understudy, a physical education teacher, Gerardo Ferrara, did scenes that required stamina, like bicycling or walking uphill.

“Sometimes [Troisi] couldn’t finish a scene,” remembers Romano Renato, a bus driver who played a pallbearer in the fisherman’s funeral in the film. Yet after one intense scene in which Noiret and he discuss the world as a metaphor, onlookers say, Troisi suddenly seemed revived, while the rest of the crew flagged.

Troisi, from a small town near Naples, liked a family feeling on his sets, Di Sauro says. “He chose Procida because he liked to work near home and with his own people.”

Among his people was Di Sauro’s 72-year-old father, Vincenzo, a nonactor who plays Troisi’s father in the film. “I’d worked in another of his films,” the elder Di Sauro says. “They’d already called other actors, but Massimo said, ‘Call Vincenzo, I think he’s right for the part.’ ”

Enzo Gadaleta, a friend of Troisi’s and the film’s local trouble-shooter, reminisces wistfully: “What was Massimo like? As he was in the film, sensitive, thoughtful--and he loved kids.”

Gadaleta has turned the local movie house into a performing arts complex with a ballet school, a theater-cinema stage and a screen with state-of-the-art projection and sound equipment.

Last year the auditorium became the Massimo Troisi Hall, and Procida has established scholarships and prizes for students who produce essays, films, poems or paintings commemorating the postman’s island.