FILM -  A Postman, a Poet, an Actor's Farewell - NYTimes.com
FILM; A Postman, a Poet, an Actor's Farewell
By MARIA LAURINO
Published: June 11, 1995
IN "IL POSTINO" ("THE POST-man"), Massimo Troisi, one of Italy's most beloved comic actors, plays a simple postman who steers his bicycle along the sandy terrain of the Italian Mediterranean coast to deliver mail to his sole client, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda.
The film, directed by Michael Radford, is the first work of Troisi's to be distributed in America. And this bittersweet fictional tale has a real-life tragic ending: Troisi, 41, born with congenital heart problems, fell gravely ill during the filming of the movie, enabling him to work for only an hour a day. He died of a heart attack last June, the day after "Il Postino" was finished shooting.
The film, which opens on Friday, was a project so dear to Troisi that he risked his life to make it. Several years ago, after reading the Chilean novel "Burning Patience," the story of a postman's gradual awakening to the poetry of Neruda, the actor approached his English friend Michael Radford about turning the book into a movie.
Mr. Radford, whose best-known films are "1984" and "White Mischief," both made in the 1980's, was apprehensive; although he's fluent in Italian, he was fearful of missing the nuances of culture that often elude foreigners. And both the director and the actor were uncertain of how to adapt this story, about the friendship between a Chilean postman and Neruda, to an Italian setting. The key to retelling it -- and to Mr. Radford's commitment -- was the discovery that Neruda, a Communist leader whose party was outlawed in Chile, lived in exile for several years on the Italian island of Capri.
Shortly after filming began, Troisi collapsed. He was told by his doctors that he would need a heart transplant immediately. "The cardiologists said he was in stable condition but that he could die on any day," Mr. Radford explains. "Massimo decided that he would continue to make the picture." The actor planned to fly to London for a transplant as soon as the movie was completed.
"Il Postino" was the 12th film for Troisi, who also directed five of the movies he starred in, and his death shook Italy. His devoted public, who had no idea that he was seriously ill, showed up by the thousands at his funeral in San Giorgio a Cremano, the small town outside Naples where he was born.
"Troisi had this ability to express the theatrical form of living that Neapolitans have in general and then translate it to the theater," said Giuliana Bruno, a professor at Harvard University and author of "Street Walking on a Ruined Map," a study of Neapolitan film. "It's not just acting out language, but using facial expressions and body language. The soul of the people comes out in his work."
Even Troisi's mumbling dialect and truncated words, often incomprehensible to Italians outside Naples, had been described by the newspaper La Repubblica as a "post-modern lullaby" to the chaotic city. (The director Ettore Scola, who made three films with Troisi, once commented that he could barely understand his principal actor.)
Troisi's irrepressible hands, gracefully scooping and swerving in the air, would dance a pas de deux of Italian mannerisms and gestures. Unlike his Tuscan colleague Roberto Benigni, whose physical buffoonery in movies like "Johnny Stecchino" makes up much of the film's humor, Troisi reveals his pathos with a mere shrug or pout, or bares his existential doubt with a naive or self-mocking phrase. In "Il Postino," Troisi tells Neruda (played by Philippe Noiret) how much he enjoyed the poet's having written that he is "tired of being a man."
"That happened to me, too," the postman explains, "but I didn't know how to say it."
Perhaps because he had a heart condition throughout his life, Troisi was keenly aware of his precarious existence. In 1982, a year after the success of his first film, "Ricomincio da Tre" ("I'm Starting From Three"), he produced and starred in a program for Italian television called "Morto Troisi, Viva Troisi" ("Troisi Is Dead, Long Live Troisi") in which he used the conceit of his own death as a comic device.
Over a decade later, in "Il Postino," Troisi had to face his life-threatening illness every day. Barely able to work, he would come on the set late in the afternoon, after Mr. Radford had rehearsed all day with Mr. Noiret and a stand-in, who was also used for shots requiring physical activity.
"Being a comic, his timing was incredibly good, and so he rarely did more than one take," said Mr. Radford. "If he did more, it would take it out of him."
Although Mr. Radford had to rewrite many scenes to allow Troisi to be seated as much as possible, the director's constraints won't be obvious to viewers. Troisi struggled to finish a film that he told Mr. Radford was his life. Whether it was that he refused to acknowledge his illness or that he profoundly understood it, Troisi lay down to sleep at his sister's house the day after his work was completed and never awoke from his rest.
Photo: Maria Grazia Cucinotta and Massimo Troisi in "Il Postino." (Miramax Films)