Wide world of cinema

The Newport International Film Festival lives up to its name

by Bill Rodriguez

Anthony Quinn

Despite appearances, film festivals do not live exclusively on thinly disguised autobios of twentysomething proto-auteurs. Polyglot Rhode Island has supported Quebecois films at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, especially in francophone Woonsocket. The Latin American Film festival has been a welcome annual event in Providence. And this year, the Newport International Film Festival has something for the state's large population of Portuguese speakers, two new films from Brazil.

The Charcoal People (Os Carvoeiros) is a 70-minute documentary depicting the exploitative industry that has denuded vast tracts of the Amazon rainforest. Charcoal is needed to make pig iron, upon which Brazil's automobile and construction industries rely. The plight of some 60,000 migrant workers is examined in the film, largely in their own words. Illiteracy and harsh living conditions are the rule for these subsistence laborers, many of whom are second and third generation. The director is Nigel Noble, who has been making documentaries for the past two decades. Currently an adjunct professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Noble won an Emmy and an Academy Award in 1981 for his first film, Close Harmony.

The second film is a feature, Oriundi, starring Bristol resident Anthony Quinn. Taking place in Curitiba, on the eastern coast of Brazil, the story begins with the birthday reunion of 93-year-old Giuseppe Padovani (Quinn). He is the patriarch of a family business and soon grows suspicious about a visiting young woman named Sophia. She is there to research Italian immigrant families like his, but he begins to believe that she is really his young wife Caterina, who died some 60 years before in a plane crash. While family members squabble about the proposed sale of their pasta business, Giuseppe's thoughts are fixed on supernatural possibilities and on his regrets over the past.

The film title means "natives." Curitiba has a large population of Italian-born residents and the dialogue is in both Italian and Portuguese. Brazilian director Ricardo Bravo worked on it with screenwriter Marcos Bernstein, best known for the 1998 Brazilian film Central Station.

Quinn's performance is a strong one in a story that ends abruptly, with consequences and unanswered questions left dangling. To this viewer, the strength was in the tensions that Quinn keeps taut in virtually every scene, whether Giuseppe was reacting to family bickering or to thoughts about his bride. At age 85, the actor still has a commanding screen presence.

Born in Chihuahua, Mexico, Quinn has been acting since he was 21. His powerful personality was noticed about that time by director Cecil B. DeMille in a small part with Gary Cooper in The Plainsman. The former street corner evangelist and architecture student was soon a star.

Quinn won two Oscars for supporting roles, in 1952's Viva Zapata! and in 1956 for Lust for Life for a mere eight minutes as Paul Gauguin -- Kirk Douglas's intense Vincent Van Gogh got only a nomination. Among his nearly 300 films, his title performance in Zorba the Greek (1964) also stands out, giving a generation of inhibited males the ideal of life-grabbing joyousness.

He has 13 children, a six- and three-year-old by his current wife. The youngest, Ryan, appeared in Oriundi, as did son Lorenzo, who plays Giuseppe as a young husband. With his current family, Quinn moved to an estate on Bristol's secluded Poppasquash peninsula in 1995.

Speaking by cell phone poolside in Las Vegas, Quinn's voice brightens as he speaks about that decision.

"Oh, my god! I love Rhode Island. I love the place where I live -- Poppasquash is the answer to my life," he says, adding that he has spent more than $1 million building on land he bought on, ironically, the island of Rhodos in Greece, which the government won't give him title to. "Now we don't need to because I have a wonderful place here. I love Rhode Island."

As well as painting and sculpting and having a show of his work now and then, he continues to work as an actor. Quinn was in four films in 1994, although that pace subsequently slowed so that he could watch his small children grow. What interested him in doing Oriundi?

"Playing a 93-year-old man. I've known several and they're much different than an 83-year-old man, and much, much different than a 73-year-old man. I wanted to play him particularly since he has a very odd situation: his wife coming back after 70 years to wish him a happy birthday. I wanted to know how that felt," he says, and goes on to joke: "The investigations I did about a 93-year-old man is that he wouldn't look at a 23-year-old girl. He would curse her for coming back because she came back too late for him."

When he arrived in Brazil to make the film, he was in for a shock. Expecting to deliver his lines in English, he found that none of the other actors knew English well enough to follow him, which threw off the pace of scenes. Portuguese was not one of his four languages, but he agreed to conduct his character's conversations in Italian.

"You know, acting in Italian was not that easy for me," he says. "I've never done a full picture in Italian. I did La Strada years ago with Fellini half in Italian and half in English, but I never worked in a full picture in Italian before."

Although his film credits are in the hundreds and growing, Quinn says that there still are roles he yearns for.

"I wanted to play Don Quixote, I never did. I wanted to play Picasso, I never did. I wanted to play Tolstoy, I never did. I'm not an actor who has fulfilled himself. I would like to play Picasso," he says, and then begins a countdown. "There's still time to play him, because he died at 92 and I can play him at 88 or 90."

Quinn has lived the sort of larger-than-life role that we have seen him in on screen, and he says he is content. Recently he and his family went back to his birthplace, Chihuahua, where a 25-foot statue was built in his honor. "A lovely, lovely experience, one of the greatest experiences of my life," he recalls.

Three years ago he married his former assistant Kathy Benvin, 35, when his divorce became final.

"I have found a life all over again, so I'm very positive about life," he says. "I have two children -- Antonia, 6, and Ryan, 3 -- which is a wonderful thing for a man my age to have."

"I'm not troubled by age at the moment. I look at it as a very positive thing," Quinn goes on. "I want to tell people who are nearing that age not to be afraid. I find new things, new positive things, every day about life."

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Behind the screen

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