Article by Francesca Strangis

Translation by Alessandra Rapone

It was August 26, 1950, when a man was walking through the streets of Turin for the last time. A farewell to the world, maybe a last weak unheard cry for help, and ultimately, the fatal choice to leave behind a life he had never been able to fully embrace. Il mestiere di vivere begins from the end, from Cesare Pavese’s last day, perhaps wanting to immediately put on stage (and so set aside) what has too often obscured his fame.

In a circular path, we get to know Pavese through interviews, letters, poems, novels and even translations, as he was also a great translator. Thus emerges the intention of the director, Giovanna Gagliardo, to bring to light unpublished or forgotten sides of this complex character: from the sense of guilt of not having fought the regime personally to the lightly touched relationship with cinema that was never fully achieved.

Through archive footage and shooting imitating his style, we are immediately immersed in the deserted Turin of that fateful day: as if on a journey through time, we seem to be walking alongside Pavese, to hear his thoughts, to fill a little of the existential loneliness that afflicted him, and that afflicts many of us. The director uses space to visually show what is enclosed in the writer’s words, enunciated in voice over, managing to create a moment of great emotion and intimacy. The transition between past and present is made evident by the change of format and the shift from black and white to colour.

In the present, we find the same places that have witnessed the passage of the writer, speaking because ‘interrogated’ by the camera and by the eye of the spectator. Using black and white archive footage, the director decides to colour each time an object or a detail of the landscape, thus inserting a cinematographic break that overlaps present and past, reality and fiction.

Il mestiere di vivere is capable of intriguing those who are unfamiliar with Pavese, but especially to give a new Pavese to his readers, captured in his sometimes-unsustainable humanity, more current than ever, and with an unexpected connection to cinema. There is only one question left that will remain forever unanswered: may cinema have saved him?