To Forget Palermo

Rosi's return to the political thriller, co-scripted by Gore Vidal, was shot in the U.S. and Sicily and features James Belushi and Mimi Rogers in the leads. Belushi is Carmine Bonavia, an ambitious Italian-American politician running for mayor of New York City on a popular platform calling for the legalization of drugs. Newly married to photojournalist Carrie (Rogers), he makes an ill-advised, politically-motivated decision to honeymoon in Palermo, the hometown of his father — and soon finds himself hopelessly entangled in a Mafia plot designed to make him reverse his position on drugs. To Forget Palermo is loosely based on the 1966 Prix Goncourt-winning novel by Edmond Charles Roux, and features a romantic-cum-sinister score by Ennio Morricone. In the film’s beautiful ball-dance sequence, Rosi pays homage to his mentor Visconti’s The Leopard. The cinematography of Pasqualino De Santis — here using a newly-developed film stock — is, as always, splendid; his Palermo is “a wrenching mixture of magnificence and ruin, and appears to decay while one watches” (Variety). Rosi has stressed that To Forget Palermo, and its representation of Sicily, is metaphoric rather than realist: “The film is metaphysical in the same way as Illustrious Corpses.” Colour, 35mm, in Italian with English subtitles. 110 mins.