Marcello Fonte, whom everyone already calls Marcellino, won the best actor award at the Cannes film festival. And this is now known. But what was not expected is the media explosion around him not as an actor, but as a surprising character even off the set. The candid and poetic statements of him already on stage in Cannes surprised everyone and now a race to find out more has been unleashed.
After all Marcello's life is full of anecdotes, which he spontaneously dispenses with both hands.
His story is closely linked to that of his brother, who is twenty years older than him, Pasquale Fonte, an architect of feng-shui, who in order to support his studies in Rome in the 80s began to make small appearances in Cinecittà.
From there he is cast as co-star in a television drama and Marcello, still a child, while having dinner with his parents, sees him on the television screen and makes his decision: he too will do this. Years go by and when he reaches adolescence, he begins to worry his mother, who decides to send him to Rome as a guest of his brother for some time. Some day he turns into ten years, where the anecdotes that Pasquale now tells are endless.
Marcello starts making phone calls left and right to propose himself, assuring him that he will pay the bills. He calls the cell phones and puts all the bills that arrive in a drawer, which his desperate brother will discover after the damage has occurred. At Pasquale's suggestion, he starts compiling a curriculum vitae and writes for days, to then present a bundle of 90 pages, which he will read in the evening at some party making everyone present die laughing.
In fact Marcello, who made his debut as a dramatic actor, has an overwhelming comic verve. In 2001, after various attempts, he manages to enter the film as an extra The gang of New York by Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo di Caprio, but at the end of production party, while everyone is looking for him, he takes the train and returns to Calabria. They call their brother to participate in his place. Similarly, in recent days, he left Cannes after the screening of Dogman, and they had to catch him again in Rome and load him on a plane, by which time all the rumors were saying he was a winner.
Then the season of occupied theaters begins. First the Valle theater, then the Palazzo cinema, a social center where the ex-convicts of Rebibbia perform. Marcello makes himself invaluable for the repairs of wires and pipes and eventually becomes their custodian. the rest is known: the protagonist dies in the bathroom and Marcello, who has learned the part by dint of listening, replaces him and is noticed by Garrone's collaborators. Today, in front of the Palazzo cinema stands a banner that reads: Welcome Marcellino.
Much more has already been said: his historic girlfriend who leaves him to become a nun and Marcello who stands in front of the convent for days with a banner where it says: I love you. His past as an all-round artist, from music to sculpture. But where the brothers, seven in all, don't fit is the story of the sheet metal roof from where he listened to the rain as a child, imagining it was applause. He told it in Cannes. We didn't live in a shack, they say, that was just a garden shed by a river. But it's too late. Envoys are already besieging the village in search of these miserable origins that never existed.
