Today Pierfrancesco Favino is in fact the symbolic face of our cinema. Today he turns 55 and we must recognize his rank as a legend of our seventh art in an absolute sense. The fact that he has not managed to reach the heights of international popularity of other iconic faces of our cinema or (looking at contemporary Europe) of a Javier Bardem, says a lot about the state of our film industry. Looking at his career, his path, means delving into the best of our cinema, and selecting its 5 most representative titles, is as difficult as it is ultimately important, because it allows us to remember his versatility as an actor, his ability to make us believe in every emotion and word he conveyed.

Crime Novel (2005)

Almost twenty years ago Michele Placido took Giancarlo De Cataldo’s novel and took us inside the genesis, the rise and finally the fall of the Banda della Magliana. Inside Crime Novel there was the best of our seventh art of the time. Kim Rossi Stuart, Stefano Accorsi, Claudio Santamaria, Riccardo Scamarcio, Elio Germano, Massimo Popolizio, Jasmine Trinca are the faces around which this criminal odyssey revolves, with a melancholic and heartbreaking tone. Above everything and everyone, however, there is the Lebanese of Pierfrancesco Favino, the charismatic, ruthless and ambitious leader who will transform that group of chicken thieves into the most important and infamous armed gang in the history of the boot. Between Mafia, State Secrets, Drug Trafficking and Politics, Crime Novel It is above all a story of virile friendship as perhaps only Sergio Leone could have shaped. The chronicle of the ambivalent relationship between the three protagonists, between the Lebanese, the Freddo and the Dandi, inevitably becomes also a journey into the different souls of Italy that from the Years of Lead, then finds itself in postmodernism, with the end of the Cold War. Sumptuous interpretation by the entire cast, but Favino finally found that general consensus there that would then make him the symbolic face of Italian cinema today. His Lebanese is a fascinating individual because he is the perfect mix of light and shadow, a conqueror who however discovers himself to be much more fragile and vulnerable than he thinks, despite his being, for a brief moment, King of the Eternal City.

The Traitor (2019)

Maestro Marco Bellocchio five years ago took Pierfrancesco Favino and guided him towards his most extreme, most difficult role, making him play an ambiguous man, who played a central role in our recent history, as the most important Mafia informer ever: Tommaso Buscetta. Favino gives us the soul, the essence of a survivor, of Don Masino, of his tragic epic inside that Cosa Nostra that, while the Cold War was ending, was changing its skin, passing into the hands of the ruthless Corleonesi. Buscetta is all that remains of the old Sicily and the old Mafia, which he believed to be a guarantee of security, a temple of sacred values ​​from which he was the first to distance himself according to convenience. The Traitor shows us his horrible odyssey, his inability to accept the lie in which he grew up, at least until he is faced with the evidence of the culture of death and hypocrisy that the Mafia represents. Buscetta will lose children, friends, will know the deepest fear, the most total isolation, will have to rebuild his life elsewhere, but inside he will remain more or less the boy from Palermo who, as a simple soldier of Cosa Nostra, played a leading role in the Maxi Trial. Favino is seductive, charming, but he always gives the idea of ​​the hidden dangerousness of this man, to whom he gives an extraordinary work in terms of voice and expressiveness, of metamorphosis not only physical, but above all mental. Perhaps his most difficult role ever.

Saturn Against (2007)

Fernan Ozpetek is a unique and very divisive filmmaker. In his career, Saturn Against was one of the best titles ever, for its depth and sensitivity. Pierfrancesco Favino is Davide, a homosexual writer, engaged to Lorenzo (Luca Argentero), an advertising man. At one of the many dinners he organizes in his house, there are a myriad of characters between the comic and the tragic, played by Stefano Accorsi, Ennio Fantastichini, Ambra Angiolini, Filippo Timi, Serra Yilmaz, Margherita Buy, who create a strange tribe that is sometimes a bit suffocating. However, when Lorenzo is taken ill and is hospitalized, a complicated period of pain and internal confrontation begins for that sort of extended family. Favino plays the most sensitive character, the most fragile and connected to a painful mourning, to a need to start over in some way, but obviously unable to forget what has been, what he has experienced. A very elegant film, in which the world of feelings reigns, understood as an inexplicable but at the same time fascinating mystery, Saturn Against It is a mix of irony and tears, confessions and revelations, a journey into the need to be honest and the difficulty in embracing the truth. Pierfrancesco Favino moves with a disarming naturalness, the spearhead of a choral film as unfortunately we see less and less in our cinematography.

Suburra (2015)

From the Rome of Magliana to that which Stefano Sollima makes a perfect image of the moral and political drift not only of Rome, but of Italy. Based on the novel by Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De Cataldo, Suburra is a story halfway between reality and fantasy, both in the characters and in the narrative process, which takes us to that world halfway between politics and crime where the Caput Mundi has found its balance for centuries. Pierfrancesco Favino here is Filippo Malgradi, a corrupt and vicious parliamentarian, closely linked since he was young to the fascist and gangster Samurai (Claudio Amendola), of whom he is one of the references in the twisted game between bad politics, petty crime and the mafia families of the South. Suburra sees Favino surrounded by a cast that includes among others Alessandro Borghi, Elio Germano, Greta Scarano, Adamo Dionisi, but in which he shines for his ability to make this man credible, hateful and pathetic, this “peones” as they would say in political jargon, who sees his role as a simple excuse to get rich and allow himself all kinds of vices. The Roman actor is incredible in his ability to convey to us all the mediocrity and falsity of this parasite, who will eventually be overwhelmed by the inevitable showdown, in yet another political storm. And yet, one cannot help but feel a certain pity for him, almost more a victim of himself and of events, than a cynical and ruthless weaving spider.

Nostalgia (2022)

Two years ago Mario Martone allowed Pierfrancesco Favino to take on a truly unique role: that of Felice Lasco in his Nostalgia. Based on the novel by Ermanno Rea, Nostalgia guides us into the life of this man, who after making a life abroad, returns to that Rione Sanità in Naples from which he had left as a boy, to comfort his mother in her last moments. However, for Felice, his old hometown exerts a unique charm, linked to memories of his youth, when he had in Oreste Spasiano (Tommaso Ragno) his best friend. But today Oreste has become one of the most feared bosses of the Neapolitan Camorra, perhaps finding him and trying to reconnect the old bonds of friendship is not the best idea, also because they share a terrible secret of youth. Pierfrancesco Favino has surpassed himself in this film, painful and connected to the theme of human ambiguity like very few others in recent Italian cinema. Felice is a man obsessed by his past, by his memories, by the dream of saving that friend of the past and also himself, and Favino is extraordinary in making us feel all the hope, the illusions, in a certain sense the naivety and immaturity with which Felice enters a dark path, buried in reality in the labyrinth of his past of which perhaps he has never fully understood the meaning. An elegant, painful film, incredibly universal despite its intimate dimension, Nostalgia It is further proof of Favino’s sensitivity as an actor, a unique actor in today’s Italian scene.