ROME (AP)—Abel Ferrara, whose gritty Recent York exploitation movies of the Eighties and Nineties delved into the soulless evils of drug addiction, corruption and sexual violence, pays homage to certainly one of Italy’s best-known and most revered saints in his newest film, “Padre Pio.”
That the film, which stars Shia LaBeouf and premieres on the Venice Film Festival next week, confirms a change of pace for the cult director is an understatement, one which Ferrara, 71, chalks as much as a decade of sobriety and a recent life in Italy.
“Once we kicked the drugs and the alcohol, we began to see a special lifestyle, of living in a special life,” the “Bad Lieutenant” director said in an interview in his recent hometown of Rome. “I feel it’s more just attempting to get our game right.”
The film chronicles a specific moment within the twentieth century history of Italy and Padre Pio, the mystic Capuchin monk best known for having displayed the “stigmata” wounds of Christ: He bled from his hands, feet and sides. Padre Pio died in 1968 and was canonized in 2002 by St. John Paul II, occurring to develop into probably the most popular saints in Italy, the U.S. and beyond.
“Once we kicked the drugs and the alcohol, we began to see a special lifestyle, of living in a special life.”
Ferrara’s treatment is not any biopic, and admittedly ignores among the juiciest bits of the Padre Pio saga, which involved a dozen Vatican investigations into purported dalliances with women, alleged financial improprieties and doubts concerning the stigmatas. Of their place, Ferrara weaves a parallel tale concerning the beginnings of fascism in Italy that’s, unexpectedly, utterly relevant today.
The film takes as its place to begin Padre Pio’s arrival at a Capuchin monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo, a poverty-wracked town in southern Italy, on the time its soldiers were returning home from World War I. The town was almost feudal-like, with the Catholic Church and wealthy large landowners attempting to hold onto power amid the primary inklings of Italy’s post-war socialist movement that saw factory unrest and peasant strikes.
That social unrest erupted right into a little-known police massacre of peasants in San Giovanni after the socialists won a 1920 local election, the outcomes of which the entrenched, church-backed ruling class refused to respect. When the winning socialists tried to hold their red flag on the municipal constructing and install their mayor on Oct. 14, 1920, police were available, shots rang out and 14 people were killed and 80 injured. For Ferrara, the “Massacre of San Giovanni Rotondo” helped foretell the spread of fascism in Italy.
Ferrara’s concern with Italian history, Catholicism and his fascination with Padre Pio will not be recent.
Ferrara, who has lived in Italy for some 20 years, began making the film five years ago, long before the Jan. 6 rebel in his native U.S., by which supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol after refusing to respect the outcomes of the 2020 election, or the rise of the far-right Brothers of Italy party in his adopted country. The Brothers of Italy, which has neo-fascist roots, leads the polls ahead of Italian parliamentary elections next month. Add to the combination Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Ferrara sees history repeating itself.
“When Jan. 6 happens after you’ve been working on this film for five years, it’s like: Right, elections are great until you lose,” he said.
The film is devoted to the victims of the 1920 massacre in addition to the people of Ukraine. Why? “What I’m is a rerun of World War II. Seventy-five million people died 70 years ago. That’s like, yesterday. It’s happening right in front of our eyes,” he said.
The context of the film, he said solemnly, is: “You’re the top of the world.”
Ferrara’s concern with Italian history, Catholicism and his fascination with Padre Pio will not be recent: The Bronx-born Ferrara was raised Catholic and introduced to each Italy and the saint by his grandfather, who was born in a town not removed from Padre Pio’s hometown of Pietrelcina.
LaBeouf spent 4 months in a California monastery preparing for the role, Ferrara said, and has said the possibility to play “Padre Pio” was a miracle for him personally.
Those interests have emerged in Ferrara’s more moderen movies, including “Pasolini” which paid tribute to the scandalous life and violent death of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and premiered at Venice in 2014; and “Mary,” about an actor (Juliette Binoche) playing Mary Magdalene in a movie, which won the Grand Jury prize at Venice in 2005.
Each “Pasolini” and “Padre Pio” relied heavily on the diaries, writings and documentation of their subjects, and Ferrara first made a documentary concerning the saint’s life before deciding to zero in on the actual period of his arrival in San Giovanni Rotondo, his doubts about his faith and the events surrounding the 1920 massacre.
“I assumed the confluence between the massacre and his stigmata each happening in the identical place at the identical time … I mean how could you not make a movie about that?” Ferrara said.
But Ferrara is well aware that his early genre work—he has done pornography, rape-revenge, the 1993 cult classic a couple of corrupt, drug-addicted cop “Bad Lieutenant,” and his earlier “The Driller Killer,” a couple of Recent York artist who randomly kills individuals with an influence drill—gave him something of a repute.
“Given the list of movies I’d made you’d be wondering,” Ferrara admits. But he said church officials and the Capuchin friars who advised on set were entirely supportive of the project and its star, LaBeouf, who has admitted to alcoholism and has been accused by a former girlfriend of abuse. LaBeouf spent 4 months in a California monastery preparing for the role, Ferrara said, and has said the possibility to play “Padre Pio” was a miracle for him personally.
“It’s just that these cats have gotten that optimistic take,” Ferrara said admiringly of the church. “Don’t judge someone on their worst moment.”