Venice gives Servillo a ghost story, and the Guardian finds it dithering

The Venice Film Festival is, as the Guardian put it this week, pretty much unthinkable without Toni Servillo. The veteran Italian actor returns in Mario Martone's Scherzetto, playing an illustrator haunted by his boyhood, and the paper's review calls the result part spooky, part sentimental — an oddity rather than a settled success. Servillo, the Guardian concedes, brings gravitas to material that dithers.

The review is a reminder of how the festival functions as a shop window. A film that Italian audiences may meet on their own terms arrives first in the foreign press, where it is weighed against the director's earlier work and the actor's long career. That judgment travels further than the film itself will.

Martone is not a newcomer to this circuit: he has been a fixture of Italian cinema's more literary wing, and the Guardian frames Scherzetto within that lineage rather than as a departure. The paper's complaint is tonal — that the film cannot decide between the eerie and the wistful, and that the ambiguity reads as indecision. It is a criticism of construction, not of ambition.

For Servillo, the notice is warmer than the verdict on the film. The Guardian treats his presence as a guarantee of seriousness, noting that the festival would be diminished without him. That is the kind of sentence a foreign critic writes about an actor who has become, abroad, a shorthand for a certain idea of Italy: controlled, wry, self-aware.

Venice's role in this exchange is worth stating plainly. The festival is where foreign critics form their impression of the Italian year in cinema, and those impressions are durable. A tepid review in a British broadsheet does not decide a film's fate at home, but it does shape how the season is summarised outside Italy, and how the next Italian submission is anticipated.

The Guardian's review offers no box-office speculation and no production detail beyond the cast and director, and we should not supply what it omits. What it does establish is the festival's continuing function as a place where Italian work is judged first by outsiders, in public, and in English.