The Desires and Irrational Explosions of Adolescence
The first steps, joys and sorrows: “I had never made love and I remember everything about that precise moment. The expectations and dreams I had loaded that moment with. The emotion, the trembling, the place, the smells, the walls of the room, the silence afterwards. I was stunned, shocked, electrified, almost drugged by happiness: I didn’t sleep for two days”.
The Innocence of Age is Only a Matter of Perspective
Pierfrancesco Favino has not forgotten the doubts of adolescence: “I kept repeating to myself: “When I grow up”, fantasizing so much about my future that when tomorrow arrived I hardly noticed it” and in giving order to the Most Beautiful Years, now that Gabriele Muccino has asked him to interpret them and the seasons are 50, he discovers that the innocence of age is only a matter of perspective: ““I will never be like my father, I will never be like my mother. I will never be like my parents”. We have all said it: to save ourselves, to emancipate ourselves, to delude ourselves of “becoming truly ourselves”, as Battisti sang. And then in the end we discover that not only are we nothing but an evolution of the original matrix, but that if we did not descend from an example, we would never have been able to make that evolution. There are no fucks, the imprinting, very strong, exists: in the life companions we choose, in our aspirations, in the way we relate to reality”.
The Son of a Gruff Mechanic
Of the three male characters of the Most Beautiful Years, an idealist, an unresolved and a pragmatic, Favino wears the clothes of the third. The son of a gruff mechanic who, starting from zero, finds his own light in social affirmation from the dark den of a basement: “He is someone who does things, builds them and puts his hands on them without fear”. Was she like that? “I was much more imaginative. More dreamy and less restless. As a boy I saw myself with a large, solid and close family. It was a conscious projection: my father had me at 46. My project was different: I would have had children much earlier because I wanted to have time to play with them”. What kind of man was your father? “A man of another generation. Orphaned at 8, after studying in the seminary, he found himself having to manage a situation of complete loneliness. He had worked all his life considering intelligence and thought as forms of redemption”. Was it important? “No more than my mother and many other people and things that formed me, starting with the choice of my profession. Acting represented my gesture of uniqueness, my identity break, my saying “I will not be like you”. I knew nothing about the world I was about to launch into except the desire to be part of it”. A desire not far from that felt by boys towards their peers. “I had my friends with whom I talked about football and music, but I had mostly my female friends. I grew up with three sisters, like in Chekhov, and I never divided the world into men or women. I was a boy who had fun, who had a social life, who tried to be sincere, not to lie and to be generous. And to discover things with curiosity and respect”.
