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ROME (AP) — Abel Ferrara, whose gritty New York exploitation films of the 1980s and 1990s delves into the heartless evils of drug addiction, corruption and sexual violence, is paying tribute to one of the most famous and Italy’s most revered saints in his latest film, Padre Pio.
This is the film starring Shia LaBeouf and premiering at the Venice Film Festival next week confirms that the change of pace for the cult director is an understatement, which Ferrara, 71, describes as a decade of sobriety and new life in Italy.
“Once we got rid of drugs and alcohol, we started to see a different way of life, to live a different life,” the “Bad Lieutenant” director said in an interview in his new hometown of Rome. “I think it’s more about trying to get our game right.”
The film describes a specific moment in the history of 20th-century Italy and Padre Pio, the mystical Capuchin monk best known for showing the “stigmas” of Christ’s wounds: He was bleeding from his hands, feet and sides. Padre Pio died in 1968 and was canonized in 2002 by St. John Paul II, becoming one of the most popular saints in Italy, the United States and beyond.
Ferrara’s treatment is not a biopic and blatantly ignores some of the most salacious parts of the Padre Pio saga, which has included a dozen Vatican investigations into alleged cheating relationships with women, alleged financial improprieties and doubts about the stigmata. In their place, Ferrara weaves a parallel story about the beginnings of fascism in Italy that is unexpectedly completely relevant today.
The film takes as its starting point the arrival of Padre Pio at the Capuchin monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo, a poor town in southern Italy, at the time when his soldiers were returning home from the First World War. The city was almost feudal, with the Catholic Church and wealthy landowners trying to hold on to power amid the first hints of Italy’s post-war socialist movement, which saw factory unrest and peasant strikes.
These social unrest erupted in a little-known police massacre of peasants in San Giovanni after the Socialists won local elections in 1920, the results of which the entrenched, church-backed ruling class refused to respect. When on October 14, 1920, the victorious socialists tried to hang their red flag on the municipal building and install their mayor, the police were there, shots rang out and 14 people were killed and 80 wounded. For Ferrara, the “San Giovanni Rotondo Massacre” helped predict the spread of fascism in Italy.
Ferrara, who has lived in Italy for about two decades, began making the film five years ago, long before the January 6 uprising in his native US, where supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol after refusing to respect the results of the 2020 election, or the rise of the far-right Brothers of Italy party in his adopted country. The Brothers of Italy, who have neo-fascist roots, are leading in opinion polls ahead of next month’s Italian parliamentary elections. Add to the mix the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Ferrara will see history repeat itself.
“When January 6th happens, after you’ve worked on this movie for five years, it’s like, OK, the election is great until you lose,” he said.
The film is dedicated to the victims of the 1920 massacre, as well as to the people of Ukraine. Why? “What I’m looking at is a repeat of World War II. Seventy-five million people died 70 years ago. It’s like yesterday. It’s happening right in front of our eyes,” he said.
The context of the film, he said solemnly, is: “You’re looking at the end of the world.”
Ferrara’s preoccupation with Italian history, Catholicism, and his fascination with Padre Pio are nothing new: The Bronx-born Ferrara was raised Catholic and is familiar with both Italy and the saint from his grandfather, who was born in a town not far from his native city of Padre Pio Pietrelcina.
These interests have emerged in Ferrara’s more recent films, including Pasolini, which paid tribute to the scandalous life and violent death of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and opened in Venice in 2014; and “Mary” for an actor (Juliette Binoche) who played Mary Magdalene in a film that won the Grand Jury Prize in Venice in 2005.
Both Pasolini and Padre Pio relied heavily on their subjects’ diaries, writings and documentation, and Ferrara first made a documentary about the saint’s life before deciding to focus on the specific period of his arrival in San Giovanni Rotondo, his doubts about his faith and the events surrounding the massacre of 1920.
“I thought the coincidence of the massacre and its stigmata happening in the same place at the same time… I mean, how could you not make a movie about that?” Ferrara said.
But Ferrara is aware that his early genre work — he made the rape-revenge porn, the 1993 cult classic about a corrupt, drug-addicted cop “Bad Lieutenant” and his earlier “The Driller Killer,” for New York artist who randomly kills people with an electric drill – gave him something of a reputation.
“Given the list of films I’d done, you’d be surprised,” admits Ferrara. But he said church officials and Capuchin monks who advised on the set were fully supportive of the project and its star LaBeouf, who has admitted to being an alcoholic and being accused by an ex-girlfriend of abuse. LaBeouf spent four months in a California monastery preparing for the role, Ferrara said, and said the chance to play Padre Pio was a miracle for him personally.
“These cats just have this optimistic outlook,” Ferrara said admiringly of the church. “Don’t judge someone at their worst.”
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For more information on the Venice Film Festival, visit: www.apnews.com/VeniceFilmFestival
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