Out of the Painful Past

The Italian soldiers disembark from troopships moored beside the quay, fall into formation and march up the main street of this picturesque island port. Greek villagers lining the path eye their arrival with a mixture of wariness and puzzlement.

It is 1941, World War II is exacting a terrible price in lost human lives all over the globe, and the sight of a foreign landing force is a sobering one. But despite the gravity of the situation, there is also enough humor about these invaders to force a smile to the most reluctant lips. For one thing, their ranks are completed by eight young women, smartly and colorfully dressed, strolling behind the last unit, twirling their parasols as they glance appreciatively at the pretty Greek town; these are the prostitutes who accompany the Italian forces on their travels.

One Italian platoon, in particular, would make observers wonder about the seriousness of this war and this invasion. It is headed by a smart young captain with doleful eyes, carrying a mandolin slung over his shoulder. As he passes a beautiful young woman in the crowd of watching Greeks, he shouts: “Bella bambina at 2 o’clock! Eyes right!” In unison, his men snap their heads in her direction. One crosses his eyes at her, another blows a kiss, a third rolls his eyes lustfully, while a fourth goes into a Charlie Chaplin walk. She looks astonished.

It’s a pivotal moment in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” a largely British-produced movie conceived on an epic scale and adapted from Louis de Bernieres’ 1994 novel that took Britain by storm. This, after all, is the scene where the lovers first meet.

Nicolas Cage is Corelli, the jocular, music-loving Italian officer involved in the occupation of Cephalonia, a tranquil Greek island. Spanish actress Penelope Cruz plays Pelagia, the young Greek woman he spies in the crowd; she is the daughter of village doctor Iannis (John Hurt), an educated man with a skeptical view of war and history. Pelagia is engaged to Mandras (Christian Bale), a local fisherman with Communist sympathies, who has disappeared after going off to fight with other Greek partisans. The story is about whether this love affair can survive in the turmoil of global war and personal rivalries.

“When I first read the script, I was very emotional,” Cage recalled after completing the “eyes right” scene. “I don’t know why, I was moved by the story’s romantic aspects. It seemed to me to be unlike anything I’d done before. I’ve normally avoided period pictures. I’ve felt inherently I was a contemporary personality. So I didn’t know if I would be anachronistic or not. That had something to do with it, the challenge of wanting to try it.”

Reflected Tim Bevan, one of the film’s producers: “It’s like ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ an amazing love story set against an epic backdrop. The book isn’t cinematic, but I think emotion is what makes epics. If you have big emotions, you can construct a movie.”

Big is the operative word for this production. On this day, Sami is filled with more than 300 military men: 100 soldiers, 90 sailors and 50 airmen from Greece’s armed forces are playing the invading Italian soldiers. Various Europeans, including the British, play German soldiers. In the harbor are two minesweepers and two landing craft, all lent by the Greek government. It makes for a spectacular re-creation of 1941.

Yet the mood among Greek onlookers, especially older ones, is tinged with melancholy. This, after all, was not a happy period either for the island’s natives or for the Italians who invaded them. The re-created scenes have also elicited mixed emotions from those old enough to remember the beauty of Cephalonia before a 1953 earthquake leveled it.

“You can’t travel very far on this island without someone telling you what they saw,” noted Kevin Loader, another of “Corelli’s” producers. “That includes Greeks working on the film. One guy helping with our accommodation saw his 13-year-old brother shot by the Germans. A cafe owner here watched 570 Italians being killed below his veranda. The bodies lay there for eight days. He said he couldn’t get over the smell--he can still smell it. The villagers took the bodies away, threw them into wells and sealed them. Now the Italians want the bodies repatriated but the villagers are superstitious about it. I gather those discussions are still going on.”

*

De Bernieres’ novel threw light on an unexplored facet of World War II: the occupation of Cephalonia by Mussolini’s Italian forces, who were supplanted by German troops in the later part of the war. (When the Germans arrived on the island in 1943, they executed thousands of Italians.)

The author managed to concoct a story skillfully blending romance, moments of humor verging on farce and episodes showing war at its most grim. Yet the sprawling book, covering 60 years and including digressions about geography, politics and Greek history, is not easy movie material; its hero, Corelli, does not even appear until a third of the way through.

The success of the book was similarly improbable. Despite his name, De Bernieres is English, and his novel became a certified phenomenon in Britain after going to paperback in 1995. It has since been on the best-seller lists in the U.K.

Although De Bernieres was almost unknown and the book had no major marketing push, it became a word-of-mouth hit, a huge favorite with book groups, and has now sold more than 1.5 million copies in Britain. Trivia note: It’s the book Hugh Grant is reading as he sprawls on a park bench in the idyllic last scene of “Notting Hill.”

Its appearance in that film could be viewed as a shrewd piece of product placement by Working Title, the London-based production company behind both films. The novel’s success ensured a rush of talent wanting to be involved with the $50-million film, and not just for acting roles. Its original director was Roger Michell, who made “Notting Hill.” But he suffered a heart attack last year and decided to pull out; his place was taken by John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love,” “Mrs. Brown”). Negotiations to secure him were conducted with Miramax, with whom he has an exclusive contract.

Two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll (“Braveheart,” “Legends of the Fall”) came aboard, as did a creative team of Oscar winners or Oscar-nominees: composer Stephen Warbeck, costume designer Alexandra Byrne and makeup artist Lois Burwell.

Two producers are on hand in Cephalonia to oversee shooting: Loader, who optioned the novel, and Working Title co-chief Bevan. “I bought it in hardback and thought it would make a wonderful film,” Loader recalled. “But it’s not the easiest story to get financed. Roger and I took it to Working Title. We wanted to make it in Europe with sympathetic European producers. We took it to them on a Friday, and they’d said yes by Monday.”

Bevan added: “You have two choices: Make it for a European-type budget and aim at an art-house audience, or say there are elements which make it universal. The budget goes up at that point, so you have to supply an insurance policy. So we wrote down a list of actors around the world who mean something and who can play Corelli. Nic was at the top of an extremely short list. He and his agents were great. He took a cut. He realized this wasn’t an action picture and cut his cloth [fee] accordingly.” (Working Title has a deal with Universal Pictures, which will release the film in the U.S. in April.

Loader added that when screenwriter Shawn Slovo was hired to adapt the book, she and Michell quickly decided to jettison its quirky digressions and focus on the love story. “We decided to concentrate on what happened on Cephalonia,” Loader said. “Shawn hit a good first draft, and big decisions were taken about what to keep and what should go. Then Roger had to drop out, John came on board, and she rewrote it with him.”

Another big decision was where to shoot. The filmmakers needed to re-create Cephalonia’s largest town, the port of Argostoli. “I never thought we’d shoot on this island,” Loader recalls. “I came here two years ago just to reference the landscape. Cephalonia has no old buildings. A terrible earthquake destroyed them all in 1953. So it seemed out of the question.

“Then we went on a long detour looking for the Venetian architecture that was here before the quake. We looked at Corfu, Venetian ports, the Peloponnesus--but I could never find the right combination of a waterside, a lack of tourism and a place that would offer sufficient cooperation. One day I was here in Sami with our former production designer who said, ‘I think we could shoot it here.’ So we locked into our Argostoli.”

Yet Cephalonia had its drawbacks. “It’s a fantastic place with richness of landscape. But it’s entirely without cinematic infrastructure,” Madden said, referring to a lack of facilities or people with filmmaking experience. “It’s a tough place to set up a film of this magnitude.”

Still, the curious process began of building a historical Cephalonia, as it existed before the ’53 quake, on the island. “We’ve effectively built a back-lot set here,” said production designer Jim Clay.

The 10 buildings of the village where Iannis and Pelagia live were constructed in a broad open space near a peninsula offering spectacular views. But re-imagining Argostoli has been Clay’s most audacious project. He has created a main street in Sami in the style of 15th and 16th century Venetian architecture, building a period shell around the modern Kastro Hotel, which serves as the unit’s production office. This main street links a square composed of the town hall and law courts on one end with the docks on the other. The film’s producers persuaded the Cephalonian authorities to move the tourist ferry terminal along the waterfront, out of camera shot. In return, they agreed to finish shooting by early July, the start of peak tourist season.

*

Clay has a batch of grim black-and-white photos of Italian troops being rounded up by Germans before their execution. In some pictures, the Italians look remarkably relaxed; apparently, they innocently believed they were being held as prisoners of war. “It seems 4,000 of them were killed in four days,” said Clay.

All this contributes to a tangible sense of unease on the island. Most Cephalonians seem happy about the film; it is, after all, contributing some $10 million to the island’s economy, according to Bevan. The increase in commercialism because of the book’s success has so far stayed within limits. True, there is a Corelli’s sports bar in Eufimia, a nearby waterfront village. But until the film’s release, at least, Cephalonia remains tranquil.

Yet the production has stirred many terrifying memories that had lain dormant for years. “The people here are very warm and nice,” noted Cruz. “Some of them showed us places where the Italians were killed. Lots of people have nightmares on this island. They dream of blood and knives. I’ve been having them myself, almost every night. I believe in these things.” She shuddered. “So many things went on here.”

These included a bitter four-year civil war in Greece, which began just as World War II was drawing to a close. The wounds and rivalries engendered by the civil war (between Communist and non-Communist factions) are still painful to older Greeks, and De Bernieres’ book has reopened some of them. Left-of-center parties still dominate political life on Cephalonia, and some Greek leftists are angry at his unflattering portrayal of Greek partisans, many of them Communists.

Screenwriter Slovo is among those fiercely critical of De Bernieres, who won’t comment on the controversy. “The big problem I had with the book was its politics,” she said. “I found the portrayal of the Greek partisans quite offensive and inaccurate. One character, Mandras the fisherman, is portrayed in a very two-dimensional, stereotypically Communist way. That gave me problems, and others too. It wasn’t only me who reacted like that. The bits about the partisans seem under-researched.

“[In the adaptation] we now have a Mandras who has no politics to start off with, who goes off to war, is politicized by his experiences and becomes a patriot. At the same time his love for Pelagia is not being reciprocated, he finds this passion to fight for his country against the Germans and Italians, the forces of fascism. It makes him more interesting and three-dimensional, less of a stereotypical villain. If he’s stronger, Pelagia’s stronger. That’s what we struggled to do.”

Slovo admits she has “a very specific political background.” She was raised in South Africa, where her father, Joe, headed the banned Communist Party in the apartheid era, and was the only white African National Congress executive member. She wrote the 1988 film “A World Apart,” an account of her own childhood.

She flatly denies being a Communist: “But I’m someone who was informed and influenced by the choices my parents made. I was a close participant of a political struggle going on in South Africa in the years of apartheid, and that cannot have failed to influence the way I see the world.”

The political contentiousness of the book does not stop there. After all, Corelli is a soldier fighting for Mussolini’s Italy, a fascist regime. But Slovo insists: “Corelli is a man whose country goes to war and is conscripted. He’s not a fascist, he’s not a Communist. When your country declares war, you don’t not fight.”

*

This appears to be the party line for the film, for Cage echoed it as well: “My feeling is, Corelli’s conscripted, he’s not a fascist. He’s an intelligent man.”

As Cage is half Italian American, it might seem the role of Corelli would come easily to him. “I’m also half (German American),” he said, “and the film deals with an unfortunate period when Germans were under Hitler’s reign and thousands of Italian soldiers were assassinated on this island.

“But I do feel a connection with [Corelli] because he is so musical,” added Cage, who has had to learn to play the mandolin convincingly on screen. “There are two conductors in my family, my grandfather Carmine and my father Anton. Carmine was also a composer, so I feel that is in me. Though I’ve never been musically trained, I felt that came naturally to me.”

Though De Bernieres denies there was a single model for Corelli, Cage referred to an Italian “gentleman named Pampaloni, who fired a cannon at a German platoon. That started a lot of friction.” This is Amos Pampaloni, now 89, who lives in Florence, Italy. Like Corelli, he was an artillery captain during World War II and also had an affair with a Greek girl on Cephalonia. Like Corelli, he was left for dead by the Germans in a pile of Italian corpses but miraculously survived.

Pampaloni, recently tracked down by a London newspaper, the Guardian, has now read “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”--and he disapproves of it. “The picture De Bernieres paints of the Greek partisans is unacceptable and completely wrong,” he said. “To speak of the Greeks as barbarians, who killed for the sake of killing, is not only unjust, it is pandering to racism.”

*

Madden and Slovo have arrived at a script that cuts away much of the book’s political intrigue; Loader and Bevan have assured Cephalonia’s political leaders that the film they are shooting is essentially a love story. There are no scenes of Communist atrocities; one partisan leader portrayed in the novel has been written out completely.

Still, the glorious backdrop to the romance remains, as Madden admits: “One of the attractive things about this book and story . . . it’s about World War II, though not from a perspective that anyone’s seen before--it manages to encompass humor, romance, almost farce on occasions, with very dark material indeed. That’s the strength of the original material. I like to go into a film that has its own world.”

Clearly “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” has the look of a major, high-end movie. Bevan thinks its impact might be comparable to that of “The English Patient,” another film in which questions were raised about the political leanings of the story and the hero.

“Good old Harvey [Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein] has paved the way for how to put out a film like this,” said Bevan. “Universal will throw money at it, but we have to make sure money’s thrown at it in the right way, and that it has integrity. You have to say ‘class’ as loud as you possibly can.”