The Italian Lover by Robert Hellenga

Author:Robert Hellenga [HELLENGA, ROBERT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780316026307
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

La Maremmana

Beryl was sitting in the Osteria dei Pazzi with Michael and Zanni. Michael was finding reasons why he couldn’t do any of the things that Zanni was suggesting.

“A crane. But we’d need a crane.”

“You’re the director, Michael. Tell Signora Klein you need a crane. We have cranes in Italy.”

“But five minutes with no sound?”

They had ordered the antipastone and the waiter was arranging crostini on their plates.

“You should always imagine you’re making a silent film,” Zanni was saying. “Then you have to use the camera to think visually. Think about it. The first meeting. Instead of Sandro emerging from the sewer, which is ridiculous, we see a young woman who’s been excluded by her American colleagues from a Thanksgiving dinner at I Tatti. She wanders out into the piazza, on the edge of tears. She sees a girl chasing her dog. She shouts at the dog to stop. There you might allow the audience to hear her voice. She calls the dog; the dog stops. And who is watching her beside the audience? You. You’re looking down from on high. You see her. You see the man who is going to become her lover approaching from behind. He’s been watching her too. They speak. We don’t hear what they have to say because we don’t need to. It’s classic. She’s angry. She pulls her whole body away from him. She jerks away. They speak some more. And then they walk across the piazza to a bar. Not a word; do you see what I mean? One long shot that takes in the piazza, the fake David, the Uffizi in the background. Simplicity itself. What do you think?”

Michael, who’d been looking at his dog-eared copy of the script, shook his head. “We’d have to get a crane, a big crane.”

“We have big cranes too.”

“But it’s not in the budget.”

“Tell Signora Klein to put it in the budget.”

“I’m afraid of heights.”

Beryl’s heart sank. She knew why her husband had never won an Oscar.

“If I didn’t have to be on the ground, I’d shoot the scene for you,” Zanni said, “but you can watch it from below on a video tap. That’s what most directors would do. Send the director of photography up in the basket.”

Beryl didn’t think that Zanni was speaking sarcastically, but if he was, he’d taken the edge off it. “Seriously, though,” he went on, “you ought to try it. It gives you a new perspective on things.”

The waiter brought more antipasti: squid, fish, little octopuses. Beryl knew that Zanni was stealing the movie, which they’d decided to call The Italian Lover. Everyone knew it, and everyone was happy, except Miranda.

Beryl stopped listening to Michael and Zanni when she suddenly realized that she could understand what the couple at the next table was saying. Her intensive Italian class at Linguaviva was paying off. She wasn’t even stopping to translate. They were arguing about a sofa (divano) that the woman had ordered without consulting her husband. She didn’t realize that she needed to consult him about every little thing (ogne cosa piccola).

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