Franco Brusati Biography
Franco Brusati (1920 - 1993) Graduated in political science in Geneva and in law in Milan, after a long apprenticeship as a journalist (he worked at "Corrente" and "L'Europeo" by A. Benedetti), in 1949 Brusati moved to Rome , where he began working in cinema as assistant director to Renato Castellani, Roberto Rossellini and Mario Camerini and as a screenwriter for numerous films. In 1955 he made his directorial debut with The Master Are Me!, based on the novel by Alfredo Panzini, a film with an ancient flavor that unfolds with captivating grace, hiding original meanings and allusions between the lines. Brusati's films (among the most interesting works, in addition to Pane e Cioccolata, Il Disorder, 1962, Tenderly, 1968; The Tulips of Haarlem, 1970; Forgetting Venice, 1979, nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film in 1980) , are developed around two guiding images: the home and the journey. The house indicates an already exhausted possibility that can only be recovered as nostalgia for the past (Forgetting Venice); the journey expresses precisely the search for a new home, still, perhaps forever, denied (the emigrants of Bread and Chocolate). Brusati's cinema, cultured and European in scope, demanded and often found flexible and mature actors, among which stand out, in addition to Nino Manfredi in Pane e Cioccolata, Vittorio Gassman and Giancarlo Giannini, protagonists of Uncle Unworthy (1989), a comedy pervaded by a pathetic streak, or Mariangela Melato from The Good Soldier (1982). A prolific activity was also that of screenwriter, which Brusati continued throughout the 1960s, collaborating on important films, including Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli (1968), Sitting on his right by Valerio Zurlini (1968), and The Garden of Finzi Contini by Vittorio De Sica (1970). The same happened with the theatrical scripts that, starting from 1959, Brusati wrote and staged with a happy dramaturgy, making use of interpreters with mature stage experience.
