Sandro Veronesi published The Hummingbird in 2019, a novel immediately catapulted to best seller whose title evokes that tiny, agile and fast bird, which has the ability to stay suspended in the air. In it he tells us about the story of Marco Carrera, a teenager from a wealthy family in love with his neighbor, Luisa, and the vicissitudes he will face in a life marked by tragedy.
His mother, an architect, nicknames him The Hummingbird, because he was very short when he was little, a growth problem that ends up being fixed with hormone injections. Over the course of two hours, we will learn about his trajectory from a child to a mature age in a coming and going of scenes that are linked in time.
Italian director Francesca Archibugi has now transferred Veronesi's story to the big screen, whom she has known since they were kids, "before he was a writer and I was a filmmaker," he comments in a Zoom conversation with La Vanguardia. The film competed at the last BCN Film Fest after going through the Rome and Toronto festivals and landed on the billboard this Friday with a cast that includes Pierfrancesco Favino, Kasia Smutniak, Bérénice Bejo, Nanni Moretti and Laura Morante. "I have read all his books, including El colibrí, which I really liked, and when the producer of the film bought the rights, Sandro thought of me to direct it. At first I was terrified because it is a complicated book, but I ended up accepting it" .
He acknowledges that Veronesi is satisfied with the result. "He has not been involved in the process but he does appear in a small cameo as the lover of Laura Morante's character, the protagonist's mother." With a script co-written with Laura Paolucci and Francesco Piccolo, Archibugi has been "quite faithful to the book, reproducing the time jumps, but leaving the viewer to have to detect what is happening and why we are going backwards or forwards". In the film, a call to Marco's cell phone, now an ophthalmologist working in Rome, acts as a forced time machine.
"In any case, I wanted to highlight aspects of Marco with his wife Marina that are not so prominent in the book. I wanted to emphasize the disaster that this man makes with his desire not to hurt anyone, which is something really destructive." The director refers to that love relationship without being a couple between Marco and Luisa that they have maintained since they fell in love as teenagers in the beautiful villa by the sea where they spend the summer with their respective families. A place as loaded with beauty as its own dark side.
The death of Irene, Marco's older sister, marks the starting point of an existence surrounded by misfortune and at the same time miraculous salvation. "The night that Marco gets involved with Luisa is the night that his sister commits suicide and he feels enormously guilty because he knew that his sister was wrong. And when things start badly they continue to turn badly" . Then Luisa has a little romance with Marco's brother, a situation that will distance the two brothers for years. "This film is not dramatic, it is tragic and Marco is the hero of this tragedy. A hero with his mistakes who faces life", admits the director.
A good man and fan of poker who lives cheated in a loveless marriage, with a woman with mental problems, and must take care of his daughter and, in the future, his granddaughter. "In his hummingbird resistance, Marco stands still but at the same time with a very high vibration. He becomes a point of strength for a feminine world, with a feminine sensibility."
And then there is the decisive figure of his wife's psychoanalyst, played by Nani Moretti, who comes to his office to warn him that he is in danger because Marina has discovered that he continues to correspond with Luisa. "Moretti's character is like a deus ex machina, someone who accompanies the protagonist in all the important moments of his life. Moretti gives him the metaphysical touch that I wanted to appear from a professional relationship at the beginning to that of a central supporting character until the end", he emphasizes.
The hummingbird is above all a film of emotions on the surface that invites the need for love, self-improvement and living life with intensity. "Sandro's book is very emotional and I think that the narrative project of both the novel and a film is the intimate relationship that has to be created between the reader and the book or between the viewer and the screen. My ambition is to enter the intimate part of each viewer in a one-on-one relationship and that when the film ends they tell their film, what they have seen".
Getting involved in this project has marked him especially on the issue of euthanasia, present at the end of the story. "I would like to be able to actively fight for it to be possible in our society without desperate people having to end their days by shooting themselves or poisoning themselves. That they can die with dignity and accompanied by their loved ones," confesses Archibugi, who is finishing to put together the ambitious television series La Storia, based on the novel by Elsa Morante. "It's an incredible classic in Italy that we've shot in six months and we've been in post-production for eight. It's a huge challenge and a lot of responsibility," he concludes.
