Pietro Castellitto is «The forger»: «I am an artist (and thief) among the mysteries of Rome»

ROMA This is the story of a young man who had relationships with the Red Brigades, with the neo-fascists, with the Banda della Magliana. At school his performance was poor, but he excelled at drawing. After middle school he dropped out of school. The forger by Stefano Lodovichi, at the Rome Film Festival (then on Netflix), is the “falsely inspired” story, due to the liberties it takes, for example Antonio Chichiarelli, known as Toni della Duchessa, unsolved artist and talented forger who lived in Rome between the 70s and 80s. A Gascon adventurer who has the free and mobile gaze of Pietro Castellitto, 33 years old, who becomes the distorting mirror of a country in transformation, entangled in dark plots. The film’s gallery owner girlfriend, Giulia Michelini, has doubts. He asks him: «Are you a thief or an artist?». And he: «Why, what difference does it make?». Castellitto, Toni was a hybrid…
«He was also approached by the deviant secret services».
Only after his tragic death in 1984 did he come into focus. And we arrive at Moro.
«In the Ter trial on the Moro case it was ascertained that it was he who drew up the false statement number 7 (that of the Duchess lake), pretending that it was drawn up by the Red Brigades. He anticipated the issues, the statement was fake news. The director didn’t experience that season, he reconstructed it by trying to mix memory and invention, with a transversal tone.”
What did you know about your antihero?
“Nothing. But we didn’t worry about looking like him, it’s a metaphor for those years. The human being closest to the criminal is the artist. Toni had an artistic temperament that bordered on enormous curiosity and a moral lightness that led him to frequent certain circles.”
But we know about the thefts.
«And of the safes he opens, the passports he retouches, the scams, the many women and the domicile that was never fixed. Then of course there were his paintings redone exactly like the originals. The girlfriend blurts out, you can’t do anything if you don’t have something to copy. At first he just wanted to put his talent into the desire to make money, he lives superficially. He wanted to be a painter and finds himself a forger. Politics and crime come later, he enters a game bigger than himself, drawn into the Moro case without having an ideology.”
The 70s are always told in their violence.
«Instead here, as producer Riccardo Tozzi says, we tell a real character, the great vitality of that period, the kids took their lives by the hand and there was the feeling that they could do anything».
An era in which it was difficult not to be caught up and involved in politics.
«There was the possibility of changing great history. My generation, on the other hand, perceives itself as if it were halfway through a history book, and the pages ahead are already written. That world created a more dangerous environment. Today we are all a little more resigned.”
But it is also the story of a friendship.
«Yes, of three boys who reach the Capital, they are ideal brothers, they represent three ways of being in the world in a Rome that attracts and retains, enchants and envelops».
Behind it is the Great History that one day in 1978 stopped in via Caetani, in the trunk of a parked Renault 4 lay the lifeless body of Aldo Moro. Not even twenty years old, Antonio known as Tony stole two canvases from a medieval church for the sole pleasure of reproducing them. And he entered his adult life.