Periodically, St Mark’s Square in Venice is flooded by spring tides. On Friday night it was inundated with Hollywood executives and movie stars for the first film premiere to be staged in the historic piazza.
Shark Tale features, perhaps appropriately, acquatic, cartoon characters, one of which speaks with a pronounced mafia growl. The voice belongs to the veteran actor Robert De Niro, many of whose defining roles have been as an Italian-American gangster.
Crowds gathered as 5 000 chairs were lined up and the world’s largest inflatable screen, more than six storeys high, was pumped up to its full size of 362 square metres. Fifty tonnes of water were used as ballast.
The equipment was delivered to the piazza on barges and several vessels moored alongside the square to house the generators needed to provide the 1m watts of electricity to power the event.
The preview went swimmingly. Angelina Jolie and Will Smith, who have lent their voices for other fish, turned out to support Steven Spielberg’s company. Dreamworks Animation, which made the film directed by Martin Scorsese. But it was De Niro who provided the sharp snap of controversy.
His mafia personna is not popular with many Italian-Americans. The 61-year-old actor, who is part Italian, is due to be granted Italian citizenship in a few weeks at a ceremony in Rome. A Washington-based group, the Sons of Italy with 600 000 members, has written to the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, demanding that he be denied the honour.
”He has done nothing to promote the image of Italians,” explained the group’s president Joseph Sciame. ”He has damaged their image by constantly playing criminal roles that tarnish their reputation.”
Since De Niro starred in The Godfather II in 1974, he has ”made a career of playing gangsters of Italian descent. He has done nothing to promote Italian culture in the US”.
Another spokesperson has declared: ”This man [Spielberg] is going to make millions of dollars with a film that is going to introduce unflattering and untrue stereotypes to millions of children.”
On Friday De Niro responded. Addressing the Venice Film Festival, he insisted: ”The characters I play are real. So they have as much right to be portrayed as any other characters. There are other characters I’ve portrayed.
”I’m part Italian, part Dutch, part French, part German and part Irish, but I probably identify more with my Italian side. I’m honoured to be asked to be a citizen.”
De Niro was born in New York. His great-grandparents emigrated from Ferrazzano in Italy’s central Molise region at the end of the 19th century. He has never visited the village.
His other mafia roles include performances in Goodfellas, Once Upon a Time In America and Mean Streets. In the animated movie, De Niro sends up his gangster roles by playing shark mafia boss Don Lino. – Guardian Unlimited Â