Scherzetto review – Toni Servillo brings gravitas to a dithering Neapolitan ghost story

Venice film festival The Venice fixture plays an illustrator haunted by his boyhood in Mario Martone’s part spooky, part sentimental oddity It’s always good to see the veteran Italian star Toni Servillo at Venice; in fact, the festival is pretty much unthinkable without him. But this initially promising prospect – adapted from a novel by Domenico Starnone – is a minor, quibbling tonal oddity, unsure if it wants to be scary or sentimental.

Servillo lends it as much gravitas as he can: his mere presence is valuable ballast and the streetscape scenes of Naples are handled with a connoisseur’s touch by director Mario Martone, whose previous Naples-set movie Nostalgia was far superior. Daniele (played by Servillo) is a septuagenarian book illustrator whose old-fashioned, hand-drawn artistry is something he testily treasures.

He has come back to his family home in Naples, to the gloomy apartment where he was brought up, just behind the train station, and where his grownup daughter Betta (Serena Rossi) now lives with her husband and their five-year-old son Mario (newcomer Lorenzo Perrotta), who is adorable and as bright as a button, but also borderline insufferable.

Read the original report at The Guardian.