PINUCCIO LOVERO: A Midsummer Death’s Dream Pippo Mezzapesa, Italy

Death has always scared mankind because it’s the great unknown. We base our knowledge on transmission, but with this topic - maybe the biggest one of all - the more experienced you are, the less you can tell. So we try to exorcize our dark companion through art and religion; but we’re still a bit afraid and suspicious. What if, instead, we started approaching death during our lifetimes, studying its habits, scrutinizing its silence? Take this attitude, spice it up with some provincial surrealism and superstition, and you get Pinuccio Lovero.

A youthful 40-year-old with a shiny bald head and a thin, yet toned body, Pinuccio always wanted to work in a cemetery. Born and raised in the south of Italy, he stopped studying after middle school and did practically every kind of job going in his hometown (including a long period as a marble cutter, making gravestones – the closest he could get to his goal). Now, finally, the chance has arrived to become the keeper of a small graveyard.

Unfortunately, our character’s life turns out to be as paradoxical as the dazed community he lives in, when we discover that since he was recruited in the cemetery, nobody has died. Whilst this is obviously a statistical anomaly, we have the feeling that as soon as Pinuccio crossed the gates of his beloved temple, Death took a vacation. Will our hero ever get to wear his ceremonial suit?

The summer goes by, hot and hallucinatory. The camera follows this lonely man wandering up and down deserted alleys, cleaning tombstones and watering flowers. Waiting. In parallel, we learn about his interest in music, his dire love-story with a local girl, his friends and his daily routine. Pinuccio’s speech is a strange, rough combination of ungrammatical Italian and dialect, but mostly we notice his glances, smile, and magnificent body language. In his childish attitude, he’s never sad or disappointed, seeming to look at the world as an odd mechanism in which he prefers to keep a quiet role. He’s a real outsider - and that’s what gives this brilliant documentary its peculiar taste.

Is Pinuccio Lovero a docu-fiction, or is Pinuccio Lovero a fictionalized man? We’re not able to answer this question, since our factotum’s otherness eludes this and many others dichotomies. He’s really larger than life, maybe even larger than death. So what about the very beginning and ending of the film, when we see him stood in front of the cemetery in his gala dress? Is he really waiting for a fresh corpse, or are we entering one of his immeasurable dreams?

Well, if “life is but a dream”, who would notice the difference?

Alberto Angelini