Cinema, literature and history have frequently been intertwined in the films of the Taviani Brothers, as they are once again infollowing the death in 2018 of his lifelong collaborator. The simple dedication on the opening credits, “To my brother, Vittorio,” reverberates lovingly throughout the action in this alternately solemn and playful chronicle of the twisty journey from Rome to Sicily of the ashes of Luigi Pirandello, ten years after the celebrated writer’s death in 1936.
Fittingly for a film about the meta-theatrical maestro of the play within a play, Taviani constructs the principal story as a series of vignettes that frequently collide with the style of Pirandello — from wry realism to teasing questions about the truth of objective narration, often flirting with unreality and absurdism.