Today Buen Camino dominates the box office with record cash, a large public debate that divides those who laugh and those who indignate and Checco Zalone, the name of art of Luca Medici, who confirms the most popular character of contemporary Italian comedy cinema. Next to him is Gennaro Nunziante, the real architect of a comic project that lasts for more than fifteen years, screenwriter and director of Bari, who already from before the record to the boxteghino recurrentizes the genre of Italian comedy. Nunziante grows in a simple and profound context linked to the community dimension, and grows artistically without shortcuts from cabaret to ironic newspapers such as The Davanti and then to local televisions TeleBari and TeleNorba. It’s the nineties, and that’s where the story is born: with very poor means, in a marginal production system, it takes shape one of the most radical comical experiences of Italian television: the duo Toti and Tata (Emilio Solfrizzi and Antonio Stornaiolo) masterfully designed by Nunziante.
Using the parody of the worst telenovelas, the caricature of TV format, the staging of urban and human degradation, that comedy puts on stage the masks of the sad southern contemporaneity of those years: The smuggler, the abusive valet, the drug addict, the little criminal. The people laugh at themselves, while the radical chic part of the city laughs equivocally believing to laugh at the people. Gennaro Nunziante’s products are horizontal comedies and the feeling of superiority is the most elegant way, that the Italian comedy has always, to make the viewer laugh himself. Tele Durazzo, conceived as a fake quiz to teach Italian to Albanians, is actually a fierce satire on the illusion of Italy as Eden. The Polpo, a vernacular parody of La Rainra, ridicules organized crime by showing its infantilism, in a Bari suspended between ferment and immobilism.
When in 2009 he debuted with Cado from the clouds, the beginning of artistic partnership with Luca Medici, the formula is already clear: a borderline character who bare the morality of the public. From What a beautiful day to Sun to catinelle to Quo go?, the couple builds an imaginary that tells the average Italian exposing it and exasperating the characters up to the collapse. Almost ten years after Buen Camino remains loyal to the idea of the happy ending, to the possibility of growth of the character, “the purpose of our life is joy” Nunziante says. The redemption of the billionaire cynic is not a moral shortcut, but the transformation of those who are conscious of themselves, regenerating themselves in simplicity and misery. If today Zalone’s films are a phenomenon that continues to speak to very different publics is because they root in that marginal and radical season of local Apulian TVs. A direct bridge between Toti and Tata and the cinema as a champion.
L’articolo Gennaro Nunziante: the director of Checco Zalone from local TV to record at the box office proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
