Very early one morning Filippo Pacini calls for me as arranged. Somehow I squeeze myself into his red Pantera. It’s like getting into a canoe. It’s such a filmic car, wonderfully dated, one feels one ought to be Sophia Loren. I should be wearing a sleeveless dress with long white gloves and a picture hat and present a spectacle of helpless chic, letting the equally filmic Filippo hand me in with maximum male gallantry, with me in giggly mode sitting down with a bump and a little feminine squeak. Or else I should be wearing a severe dark suit and get briskly in unaided, with the air of someone equally used to slipping behind the steering wheel. Fat chance. And anyway, I doubt Sophia Loren was brought up on a diet of kasha and shonka.
‘My father’s flying up from Rome,’ says Filippo as he blasts round the steep hairpin in Casoli. I have a fleeting impression of a war memorial with bronze figures caught in the act of hurling grenades, though I suppose they might be Casoli’s traffic safety officers reduced to apparent slow motion by the speed of our passing. I snatch a glance at this heir to the Pacini fortune. Not at all like Cary Grant, as it happens; more like a very young Gregory Peck. I can bear that.
We are on our way to the main set of Arrazzato, whose construction is apparently almost complete. The same could be said of my score. In a sudden burst of inspiration I have put a lot down on paper very fast and can now relax a bit. My computer skills have also come on this last month, thanks to my sweet geek Simone who is patience itself. I don’t for the life of me understand how any of it works, but by dint of writing myself copious memos and sheets of instructions I can do what I need, including e-mailing Pacini père bits of my score as sound files. He does seem very pleased so far, which is the main thing. He keeps on saying this film is going to be his masterpiece, but then this is an industry where egos seldom take a back seat. At least I can claim its score is also my masterpiece to date, being much better than Vauli Mitronovsk and really quite catchy. I’ve got a tango tune that Prokoviev would be proud of: apparent shmaltz but with something very putrid underneath. Pacini claims he’s haunted by it and already it has become the sound of his film (and this before the screenplay has even been finalized, apparently).
Before we reach Pisorno Studios Filippo stops at a bar for coffee, which is just what I need at this hour. There are very few people about. The holidaymakers must all still be in their hotels among the dusty pines, sleepily tackling breakfast and nursing yesterday’s sunburn. He helps me out of his car with a graciousness that makes me feel sorry for him that I’m not Sophia Loren, merely a dumpy East European with a gift for tunes. I do like Italian mannerliness. I’m afraid Voynovian manners are a little rough and ready. Pretty rough and eternally ready; which is why Father automatically suspects ulterior motives when men here are just being polite. It’s an awful thing to think about one’s own parent, but he more and more strikes me as a barbarian, a thought that never occurred to me until I came here.
‘You’re very silent,’ Filippo says. ‘I’m sorry it’s so early.’ He dabs fastidiously at his lips with a paper napkin. ‘But it gets so hot later on.’
‘I was just wondering whether Sasi will be waiting for us.’
‘La signora Vlas has not been invited. Your Italian is so good these days we decided we wouldn’t be needing her services. Were we right?’
‘So far as I’m concerned.’ This is excellent news. My compatriot and I were not destined for close friendship. The mock-refined vowel sounds of her Bunki accent are enough to spoil anybody’s day. Nor am I grand enough for her, not by several orders of social magnitude.
No sooner have I re-inserted myself into the Panther than we are turning in at the familiar gates of the fascist villa. Or rather, completely unfamiliar. Our tyres ping and crunch up a gravel drive between neatly trimmed oleanders and the car stops in front of a dazzling white house. There is a balustraded verandah shaded by a striped awning that gives a view of rich lawns ending in glimpses of the sea between a pair of cypresses. The parking space behind the house is full of vans with muscular young men in jeans and T-shirts unloading film equipment. Aluminium boxes with handles are stacked in heaps.
‘But …’ I begin foolishly.
‘It’s not the same house,’ he explains. ‘That’s next door and we haven’t touched it. This villa’s identical because Pisorno Studi deliberately built them as a matched pair. My father has decided he now wants a pre-war flashback, so we’ve restored this one and left the other. Then and now, you see.’
‘Incredible. Was this house in as bad condition as the other?’
‘No, luckily. There was a caretaker living here until recently. He was supposed to keep an eye on all these villas but it was obviously impossible and he was too old anyway. We’ve spent the last month making this place look new. Wonderful what a coat of paint will do. It’s all a bit finto,though; one oughtn’t to look too closely. Inside, we’ve only restored the room with the verandah for internal shooting. The rest of the house is pretty tatty but it’ll do temporarily for our production offices. The real money went on landscaping. Can you believe the lawn was laid only fifteen days ago? And that left-hand cypress down there towards the sea? I think it’s plastic or something. The one on the right’s genuine but my father wanted two of them. Something about the fascist bourgeois ideal of symmetry. What do I know? I was born in nineteen eighty. The umbrella pines are original. All these oleanders are new. Well, they’re transplants, of course, and as this is exactly the wrong time of year for transplanting things we’re giving them intensive care until the flashback’s in the can. There’s a squad of gardeners here practically mainlining the shrubs with fertilizer or adrenaline or whatever it is you do to keep them alive for a week or two. After that they’re on their own.’ A blue and white helicopter clatters into view. ‘That’ll be Papa now.’
The helicopter banks and settles behind the house and presently the great Piero appears. His checked shirt and Stetson consort oddly with the reading spectacles dangling on his shirtfront from a cord. I now realize something about him reminds me of John Huston in Chinatown: just a faint flash of the reptilian patriarch, though nothing like as old and craggy. He comes to a halt in front of me and crinkles his eyes.
‘Behold, Filo,’ he says. ‘This is the person about to make cine history. The lady composer of a master score. My God, how long we’ve waited for this!’
He slips an arm warmly about my shoulders and I smell an agreeable scent like old libraries. I’m grateful that last night I skipped Mili’s goose grease and her statutory two hundred strokes of the brush. No amount of folk specifics can ever change my hair’s colour from its undistinguished mouse but no one could deny it’s looking lustrous without – I hope – giving off that faint barnyard smell I have always associated with childhood and which is so characteristic of provincial Voyde girls. Despite myself I glow a little beneath his praise while giving a deprecatory shake of my head.
‘Better wait until it’s all done before you become extravagant,’ I tell him.
‘I have one hundred per cent confidence. Two hundred. Before you began, let’s say I was eighty per cent confident. But now – it’s magnificent. That tango of yours is lethal. Talk about hooks! I’m driving my poor wife nuts with it. She says I hum it in my sleep and now she’s talking openly about divorce. Anyway, how do you think this place is looking? Don’t you expect to see Il Duce and la Clara having breakfast on that verandah? And then down to the beach where Mussolini will indulge the photographers with a bare-chested run and Petacci will stand with her dimpled knees, gazing out to sea? Come, I must show you the beach and what we’ve done there.’
He leads the way across the lawn, the rest of us falling in with him obediently. I notice our party has been unobtrusively joined by a man and a woman with clipboards and alert expressions. They had better not miss anything the great director says.
‘Has Filo mentioned this flashback idea of mine? He has? Our storyline has become still richer. I wanted to bring in some real fascist background, you see, because I don’t think Italian cinema has reminded us enough of that extraordinary period, that strange mix of cultural aerobics and disease. You’re going to say The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and I’m going to reply that the film wasn’t really about fascism, it was about an aristocratic family retreating from political reality behind the walls of their estate. A rather hackneyed theme, though always one that gives plenty of opportunity for a nostalgic wallow. The exact nature of the external threat scarcely matters; pretty much anything would have done, from typhoid to totalitarianism. I want that authentic fascist righteousness on its own, unopposed. I want the bourgeois values, the revival of Latin, the purging of foreign phrases from the language, the telefoni bianchi of it all.’
‘So how will it fit into your story?’
‘OK. Lando’s father who owns the trawler fleet? It was his grandparents who owned this villa. They were thoroughgoing fascists, believed in it utterly. Lando’s father has inherited the house – that’s what we see next door, derelict – and Lando realizes it’s the ideal place for his Green drop-out commune. He’s a blank about Mussolini and the fascist period, of course. No one of his generation knows a thing about all that, or gives a toss.’
‘Your idea being?’
‘My idea being that of establishing some punchy parallels. I want to show that, contrary to what you might think, there is a deeply bourgeois streak in Green idealism. I also want to show that it takes very little pressure to tip that into fanaticism, whereupon certain behaviours become remarkably fascist. An old theme, you’re thinking. Obviously I don’t want to be polemical. I shall simply let it emerge by means of the metaphor of this villa’s decay: that something of the political stupidity and rankness of 1938 was somehow built into its fabric where it has lingered and re-surfaces in 2003 to corrupt Lando’s idealism.’
‘I see. And the erotic, er, excesses?’
He gives me a shrewd sidelong glance. ‘Those, my dear, are what happen when people lose their sense of purpose. I imagine that was the point of Pasolini’s Salò, only he became sidetracked by his own pathology. As a result the film itself is quite unwatchably disgusting and tells us little about fascism and entirely too much about Pasolini’s fantasies. I can assure you Arrazzato will be on quite a different level.’
Truthfully, I’m a little surprised by Pacini’s simplistic reading of history, human nature, sexuality, whatever. It reminds me of the sweeping wisdom of our Voyde schoolteachers telling us about the inherent contradictions of capitalism, how it went against man’s natural socialism and therefore could only ever be imposed under duress. The events of 1989 quickly revealed this as dire nonsense even if we hadn’t already known. But when that happened and Voynovia was left without the purposefulness that Soviet ideology had presumably given us, did widespread fucking and abominable debauchery break out on all sides? Sadly, no. For a day or two we held tipsy street parties and sang old national folk songs with tears streaming down our faces. Then we grimly set about trying not to starve.
But here we are at the sea which lies seductively, twinkling and dimpling like a courtesan welcoming all comers.