Franco Battiato, “The long journey” between documentary and fiction

These days, you can’t deny anyone a biopic. Imagine if it can be denied to Franco Battiato, who undoubtedly is more than deserving of it.

The problem with biopics, however, is that they have to walk the line between documentary and fiction, so anyone who knows the central character of the work (whether a fan or a fussy journalist) will not be able to help but notice inconsistencies or blunders in the script. In “Franco Battiato – The Long Journey” I saw some, although not too annoying. There are also, so to speak, narrative accelerations functional to the narrative, or undocumented inferences (for example the discussion staged between Giuni Russo’s character and Battiato on the evening of Alice’s television appearance in Sanremo with “Per Elisa”).

I write “the character of” but “it is” Giuni Russo, because in the film she is called by name, just as Fleur (Jaeggy) is called by name, just as Giusto Pio is called by name – and he is, of all of them, the one who most seemed to me to really resemble the real person (Giulio Forges Davanzati is good). But there are also Giorgio (Gaber) and Ombretta (Colli) and Juri (Camisasca) and Antonio Ballista, barely sketched figures who are assigned cameos. There are also Angelo (Carrara) and Gianni (Sassi), who are unfortunately given an almost caricatural Milanese attitude, just as the record companies to whom Battiato announces his desire to succeed are decidedly caricatural (and who are also made to speak with a Milanese accent – while they were not Milanese; just as it is not true, as one of these is made to say, that “Patriots” sold less than “L’era del boar bianca” – it is the opposite).

But, as I was saying earlier, here we are in the field of invention, or reinvention, and we are in fact in a biopic, not in a documentary. While instead there are explicitly biographical details: the football match in which Franco shattered his nose against a post (an episode that actually happened, however not to Battiato as a child playing with friends on the beach, but to Battiato as a boy in a minor league match), the poker games with Fleur and Roberto Calasso with Adelphi books instead of chips, the 1989 performance in front of Pope John Paul II at the end of which Battiato was unable to finish “And I’ll come looking for you”, the 1981 television interview with Mario Luzzatto Fegiz in “Mister Fantasy” (“a friend of mine was looking for a center to get a perm”). Here: it is precisely the adherence to the news events of some sequences that highlights by contrast the historical inconsistency of others (it appears to me, but I could be wrong, that Grazia Patti, Battiato’s mother, joined her son in Milan well before 1971, while in the biopic she arrives in the days of that year in which the famous Busnelli advertising posters were put up in which Battiato is photographed on a sofa; certainly, narratively it is a functional solution, but it bends reality to fiction).

Moreover, Battiato’s recording career is also told in leaps and bounds, and Monica Rametta’s screenplay completely skips both the pre-“Fetus” phase and that of the albums between “Sulle corde di Aries” and “L’era del boar bianca” – and more or less interrupts itself at the end of the nineties, with the (hardly credible) scene of the writing of the lyrics to “La cura”.

Here, what I can say in trying to find a synthesis is that this biopic – a bit like the one on Queen, “Bohemian rhapsody” – should not be considered as a “true story” of Battiato, despite the fact that some of the artist’s video clips are even reconstructed in it. It is, instead and with a certain amount of evidence – but this would need to be confirmed by director Renato De Maria, who in any case worked with the support of the Franco Battiato Foundation presided over by his niece Cristina – a film about Battiato’s very close relationship with his mother, the most important woman in his life. Simona Malato, who plays her, does an excellent job, avoiding excesses of sentimentality. Dario Aita (in the photo in the article) does a good job, and it wasn’t easy, as he plays Battiato also re-singing his songs (but was it really necessary for him to imitate the voice – or, more than the voice, the drop of Franco’s spoken phrasing?).

I’m curious to read what film critics and my fellow music journalists will write about the film. Once I finished watching it, I wanted to watch the DVD of “Perduto amor” again…