Gianny Musy

Once upon a time there was a youngster with a childohood probably happy and  surely marked with the difficulties of the war; a city, Milan, a quite odd familiy and a 'sweet and blessed Country' where 'the most ancient people of the world live', a people that 'with two loonies of bread and hope, drinks a glass of wine and drifts along'. The boy follows the path drawn by his parents, almost without thinking on his future, learn a trade and save it for the rainy days, in his experience, for the early days. His parents are actually two actors, the father is one of the 'bad guys' face of the Italian cinema from the very beginning, and also a theatre actor. We can imagine that he must have been strong-spined.

After graduating in law during the '30s of the last century, when illiteracy was current affairs, decides to move to Paris, where he sets the Teatro degli italiani (Theatre of the Italians) and is encouraged by  Sacha Guitry and Pierre Chenal to take a stab at this prodigious technological and continuosly evolving novelty that was affirming its popular and artistic importance, where the white telephones just appeared. But that's another story, perhaps. The youngster is Gianni Musy, who learned playing under the spotlights even before learning his first words, coincidences and fate. The father Enrico migrates together with the mother Gianna Pacetti, actress, to the French capital in those years and the young Gianni couldn't not be amazed, enchanted and dazzled with all that lights, scenes, costumes and the words, the written words that become images, and the staged words reproduced for the first time just before his birth. 

Actually it's the same that happens when he plays kids games, with the difference that at the cinema the words become images identical for everybody and not only visible to the eyes of a child. Words that become imagination, that magic that make so many people dream worldwide, words that become dancing music, visual narration. While Gianni moves his first steps, cinema learns how to talk, even with the voices of his father and his mother, fate, perhaps. 

In 1940 Musy is turning ten and Charlie Chaplin uses for the first time in his filmography the sound to say something that cannot be unsaid anylonger; after the Modern Times' grammelot, the Great Dictator. 

Cinema for actors in not only cameras and photographer's flash, more actual actorial activity, beyond and together with the moving image there's the voice, and Musy learns the trade, among  the other cinema jobs, where the Italians are the best in the world, the art of the dubbers. And he becomes famous. More than a celebrity one of those 'cult' characthers of Italian cinema. Remembering the charachters and the actors he dubbed would be too long and would distract the focus from a story of the Italian provincia, best said of the Roman and Sabine province.

Gianni Musy lived indeed in the Roman Sabine, surrounded by his friends and neighbours, such as Sergio Endrigo, with whom he wrote the words of the song quoted at the beginning of this eventually provincial keepsake. And you almost have the impression to actually see him wandering in the small roads of the towns where his voice echoes, listened also during the events that are important for the locals without being under the heady spotlights of the seventh art, when he showed, causing a number of gossip and comments, sided by two young, beautiful girls, the  ones you never know if they have the brands label as their make-up and hair-style is always so similar to the cover picture of the season's magazine.

When I read the poster that announced his departure, on a simple and sober publication of the local funeral honours, I almost had the impression of seeing him there, skinny and standing tall,  between his personal body guards, to read unbelieving his name not scrolling on a movie screen  but in the sad glances of the locals, normal provincials who loved his ability to wonder them with a story, a novel, a movie.  ©2011.2020