Henry IV
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Henry IV
1984. Italy. Directed by Marco Bellocchio. Screenplay by Tonino Guerra, Bellocchio, based on the play by Luigi Pirandello. With Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Latou Chardons. As befits a movie about acting, Bellocchio’s “free adaptation” of Pirandello’s 1921 play brings together two great stars of the Italian cinema: Marcello Mastroianni, as a scholar who has lived for 20 years under the trauma-induced delusion that he is the 11th-century Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, and Claudia Cardinale, as the aristocratic woman he loved before his accident. Role-playing abounds as Henry’s psychiatrist concocts an elaborate scheme to shock him out of his medieval reverie: he’ll be forced to confront both his lady love as she is in the present, and as she was in the romantic past, as embodied by her look-alike daughter. In Italian; English subtitles. 85 min.