Paul in Mayerling, a portrait

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Paul in Mayerling, a portrait (Paul a Mayerling, un ritratto)

Paul in Mayerling, a portrait (Paul a Mayerling, un ritratto)

original title:

Paul a Mayerling, un ritratto

directed by:

cast:

Paul Vecchiali, Hélène Surgère, Malik Saad, Mariane Basler, Philippe Bottiglione, Roland Vincent

cinematography:

country:

Italy

year:

2025

film run:

78'

format:

colour

status:

Ready (03/02/2025)

Paul in Mayerling, a portrait is the personal and choral story about the end of an existence inextricably linked to cinema.
In the mid-2000s I had the chance to meet Paul Vecchiali online.
From this moment is born a relationship marked by a very lively and stimulating confrontation on cinema and life. In 2009 I asked him to film the shooting of his next movie. This is how Paul in Mayerling long elaboration began.
At length and step by step, the project reaches the goal in 2025, with the help of so many friends who, as in a relay, contributed to the realization of this film-documentary.
Mayerling, is the title of Anatole Litvak's 1936 movie, with Danielle Darrieux, which marked the fate of Paul Vecchiali as a filmmaker. Mayerling is also the name of the villa in the south of France where he lived and directed his last movies. At the end of 2022 I had the opportunity to submit my work to him, thirteen years after the beginning of my shooting, so that Paul could observe Paul, in a counterpoint of memory and reflection, as in a mirror of time.
Paul Vecchiali and his house, Villa Mayerling. An independent filmmaker, unclassifiable, shrill, provocative, touching. His house transformed into a set, cinema factory, home, hotel, studio. At the beginning of filming he has seventy-nine years and many films, TV shows, documentaries, books and projects behind him. Successes and failures of a cinema that has always been different from the common context, designed "to invade rather than escape".
"For me today, there is a great sense of guilt. A sense of guilt for being old and still being active.” It’s Paul who says it at the beginning of his interview, at the beginning of the path that traces his portrait divided into many chapters. We are on the eve of filming one of his movies. One of his films that has as subject the place where he lives, his house, every time transfigured even if it has not been changed at all. Studio and subject in which many stories are intertwined.
“Daily life is not a problem for me, appart for the fact that it is burdened by this need to make exist the imagination that I have constantly moving in my head. Constantly, constantly. I think I would die if I don’t let my imagination speak”. And the characters add up, overlap, tell stories, intertwine, leaving their memory within the same walls in which they were generated.
Thirteen years later, Paul observes himself and his collaborators talking about him, he integrates missing parts, he is moved, he gives further explanations. With the same passion of the past he tells his cinema.
An idea of cinema, aesthetics, relationship and responsibility with art and life.