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MovieMail's Review
Tea with Mussolini is an autobiography based on Franco Zeffirelli's experiences growing up in 1930s Florence, and as at the time of filming I'd known its director for almost 30 years there wasn't much need to look at the script.
As for the setting, Florence has changed a lot less than most places. For example, in the first day's shooting, of young Franco at the weekly rendezvous with his father and an ice cream, the location was the same, and every detail, down to Charlie Lucas's sailor suite, exact. Likewise, inside the church at San Gimignano all is for real where, on any other film, you could be assured the Ghirlandaio frescos getting protected by Judi Dench and a wall of sandbags would have been painted by a scenic artist. There was just a single authentic detail where chance took a hand. The church had been damaged by shell-fire and our art department created a mass of wooden beams and masonry inside the nave, though they stopped short of blowing a hole in the fabric. The best and laziest way to simulate sunlight streaming through a smashed roof is to hoist up a six-foot mirror and aim a searchlight at it. The following day one of the locals showed me a contemporary photograph in which the shell-hole of fifty years ago was in the exact spot that I had positioned our mirror.
Such care for authenticity in the cinema usually implies that departure from it can go as far as it likes. So, in the interests of American distribution and corresponding budgetary advantages, the character played by dear old Cher is entirely fictitious.
Set in Florence in the 1930s and 1940s, this drama is based on the childhood memories of director Franco Zeffirelli. Illegitimate Luca is not acknowledged by his real father. Growing up, his life is influenced by a group of independent women, an art collector and an archaeologist who raise him to become the perfect English gentleman.
