The Legend of 1900

Giuseppe Tornatore follows a telling, not events: everything arrives as a story the trumpet player Max recounts in a music shop. His subject is a baby found abandoned in an ocean liner’s first class dining room on the first day of 1900, named not from a birth but from the finding: the stoker who raised him, the fruit crate he lay in, the year. This was Tornatore’s first production in English. Much of it was shot in Odesa, the liner interiors were built at Cinecittà, and the Virginian was modelled on the Lusitania and the Mauretania. The source is a one man stage piece by Alessandro Baricco, where the trumpet player is called Tim, not Max. Ennio Morricone won best original score at the 57th Golden Globes, and the film took 6 awards at the 44th David di Donatello: director, cinematography, production design, score, costumes and the students’ David Scuola. It lost best film. Tim Roth sits at the piano, but the playing is Gilda Buttà’s. A good fit if you will sit through long monologues to hear why a man refuses to walk down a gangway. Not for you if you take the narrator at his word, since details like piano wire heating enough to light a cigarette belong to Max’s account, not the film’s world.