Puccini e la fanciulla

Benvenuti’s latest, dazzling opus was conceived for the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of composer Giacomo Puccini’s birth. Once again, rather than tailoring a conventional biopic, in the first picture where he fully shares directing credits with wife Paola Baroni, Benvenuti singled out a precise episode in Puccini’s life: the controversial love affair with his maid Doria Manfredi, that eventually led to the latter’s suicide. With the help of students from his film school Intolerance, Benvenuti embarked, as usual, on a meticulous process of historical research, and came up with the unexpected discovery of the true identity of Puccini’s lover and source of inspiration for the opera he was composing at the time, La fanciulla del west. A finding that entailed a huge controversy (also judicial) around the film.
Yet, to Benvenuti, Puccini and the Young Girl is the film where he could most clearly elucidate the mechanics of class relationships, or of how a dominant class uses its subjected as it likes. In order to emphasize the emotional côté while keeping a respectful stance towards the characters involved, Benvenuti and Baroni fashioned a one-of-a-kind stylistic paradigm, shaping up Puccini and the Young Girl as a fascinating dialogue-less picture, punctuated only by music and readings of original epistolary correspondences.