Passione
In 2007, actor John Turturro self-released his directorial debut Romance & Cigarettes, a workingman's jukebox musical, featuring a star-studded cast of adulterous and eclectic outer-borough New Yorkers. In that film, ironworkers, hairdressers, and one redheaded buxom bimbette self-reflexively took leave from their hardscrabble lives and burst into song and dance, lip-syncing pop song and Motown revelry.
One of the most exotically enticing musicals in recent memory, Turturro's debut serves as a welcome gateway for his sumptuous sophomore effort, Passione, a foreign (and equally exotic) travelogue musical of sorts that forgoes narrative in favor of cultural and historical excavation.
Playing eloquent host and tour guide behind as well as in front of the camera, Turturro embarks on a foot-walking journey through the cobbled streets, seaside vistas, and Gothic cathedrals of Naples (pronounced Napoli) and its indigenous musicianship -- a hybrid of world cultures nearly a millennium in the making.
Passione thrives as its music oozes with variety: celebratory, pulse-pounding dance numbers, star-crossed ballads, divine hymns, and little ditties about Neapolitan delicacies. It's vaudevillian documentary, and the Italian-American Turturro proves to be an inviting if mercurial host, as if his racist pizza-making, Sicilian-doting character from Do the Right Thing wised up, moved beyond Sinatra worship, and got hip to a flavor of internationalism.
As a director, Turturro capably justifies Naples as a significant musical hotbed on par with the globe's most resounding locales. He blends interviews with professional Neapolitan artists (in performance) and with resident musicologists. But he eschews long, drawn-out history lessons about the city. Instead, he lets the music sing for itself.
Infusing the concert film -- if you can call it that -- with incomparable landscapes, Turturro jumps back and forth between solo soundstage-set ballads and literal renderings of story songs; some provide a ham-fisted wink to the audience, others are more expressionistic. Naples is alive, sprawling, and vividly depicted; the throngs of festivalgoers always seem to be in motion.
As a movie, Passione may be experimental and a tad languorous. Ultimately though, it challenges and engages us to find the familiar in the Neapolitan sounds it presents, and the voices who project Italian verse -- only a handful of songs are subtitled -- reveal a universal language that speaks beyond rhetoric and into the soul
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