IL POSTINO AKA THE POSTMAN (DUAL EDITION)

Description

One of the most moving and poetic films ever made, Michael Radford’s epoch-making IL POSTINO (aka The Postman) is now presented in a stunning restored version. Telling the fictional story of the real-life Nobel laureate poet Pablo Neruda’s exile to a tiny island off Italy where, being a high-profile figure, he receives such huge quantities of mail that the local post office must hire an extra postman: Il Postino. Though shy and poorly educated, our postman (Massimo Troisi) is so intrigued by Neruda (Philippe Noiret ‘Cinema Paradiso’) that he devises ploys to engage the attention of the great poet. The unlikely duo become friends as Neruda is charmed by the fresh simplicity of the postman whose love for poetry he then applies to woo local beauty, Beatrice (Maria Grazia Cucinotta ‘The World is Not Enough’). Framed by an unforgettable Oscar®-winning score by Luis Bacalov, the duo’s on-screen charm, coupled with Radford’s unobtrusive yet inspired direction, make this an undisputed masterpiece – which, like all great art, speaks to our subconscious, here with warm loving humanity… yet also light-hearted fun.
* Italian audio with new revised English subtitles

How we made Il Postino – Interview by Phil Hoad on The Guardian

Michael Radford, director

Massimo Troisi was a huge star in Italy. He loved a film I’d made called Another Time, Another Place, about Italian PoWs in Scotland. We looked at various projects to do together, and he’d bought the rights to this Chilean novel called Burning Patience, about the death of Pablo Neruda and his friendship with a 17-year-old fisherman.

He’d had an adaptation written already, but it was awful. Massimo and I started again, working with Anna Pavignano, his former girlfriend, in a beachfront hotel in Santa Monica. We made the fisherman a 40-year-old postman, played by Massimo, and Neruda’s exile was our invention, too. One moment in the book stood out. In the 1970s, Neruda had asked the fisherman to send him tape recordings of his house at Isla Negra. I saw that it could be built up as an expression of the postman’s desire to do something creative. For me, that was the key.

Read the full article here