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How often did you dream of the eternal Napoli, mystery city of hundreds of palaces... You have been, I know it, you travelled the pages of a book, or lingered your eyes on a movie screen. Your imagination caressed already those walls surrounding years of glory and misery. Nothing will be better than your imagination, the noise, the scent, the fast and the thieves. It is the city of eccentric scientist princes, of lost fortunes, of a certain poverty and a powerful intellectuality living under Vesuvius' pulsation. |
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Severio Costanzo took us there without showing much of the city, we remained hungry of it at the end of the first season of "L'amica geniale". He adapted Elena Ferrante's world wide best seller using the Neapolitan dialect, showing us the blooming and lost of this dream with a certain musical rhythm, in a post-war enchanting realism, the blooming and lost of this prodigious little Lila Cerullo, born in a far away suburbia, played by Ludovica Nasti.
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The young actress delivered a state of belonging, a feeling of perfection as if this little girl has always existed and will appear again in another grey and violent society. This eternal piccola Lila, beautiful and brilliant that can only deceive us while growing. This will never be other than the vision of a moment, fresque of all lives, a camera perpetually traveling in a deserted spot of our minds.
This state of perfection in acting, the stillness of elements allowing the collective memory to flourish in order to better hit with nostalgia; this quality of performance can only be in an infant actor, an actress in this case. No wander she received the Cinema Campania price during the Cannes Film Festival. Her matrice, her home land applauding the prodigious Ludovica Nasti.
Alexandra Mas
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All images by Marco Tassini for Mas Tassini Studio
