Toni Servillo Spends ‘Scherzetto’ Trapped in a Naples Apartment With the Five-Year-Old Who Out-Manoeuvres Him

It plays out of competition, but Scherzetto is one of the marquee Italian premieres of the 83rd Venice Film Festival: Mario Martone reunites with Toni Servillo for a chamber film that shuts a celebrated illustrator and his five-year-old grandson inside a single Naples apartment and lets the two of them fight it out. It screened on 10 September in the Sala Grande, in the Venice Open – Out of Competition strand.

The film adapts Domenico Starnone’s 2016 novel Scherzetto, published in English as Trick in Jhumpa Lahiri’s translation. Servillo plays Daniele Mallarico, a widowed artist in his seventies who has built a careful life in Milan and grudgingly returns to the family home in Naples to mind his grandson Mario while the boy’s parents are away at a conference. What is pitched as a short favour becomes a duel: the boy tests every limit, the old man discovers how little authority age has bought him, and the apartment — with its balcony and its ghosts — turns into an arena. The title names the register: scherzetto is the “little trick” Italian children chant at the door for sweets, a small cruelty dressed up as play, and the film keeps that double edge throughout — nothing here is quite a game and nothing is quite serious.

The bet is entirely on scale. Martone, who moves between opera, theatre and cinema, and his regular co-writer Ippolita di Majo compress the film to four walls and a balcony, so that everything has to come from two performers separated by seventy years. Servillo works in a lower, warier register than his grand public monsters; opposite him, a small child is asked to carry half the film. Around them Martone sets Serena Rossi, Leonardo Lidi, Gianluca Di Gennaro and Giovanni Ludeno, but the picture is built as a two-hander, and its risk is the oldest one in the chamber form: whether a single flat, held for a hundred minutes, can keep its charge.

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It is also a very Neapolitan film from a director who keeps returning to the city. Martone has brought Il sindaco del rione Sanità, Qui rido io and Nostalgia to Venice in recent years, and Naples in his work is never mere backdrop — it is the pressure that acts on his characters. Here the childhood home Daniele fled is where he is forced to face his age, his past and the person he became by leaving; the grandchild is simply the instrument that pries all of it open.

The reunion carries its own history. Martone and Servillo go back to the Naples theatre collective Teatri Uniti, and the director last built a film around the actor with Il sindaco del rione Sanità in 2019; the shorthand between them is part of what a chamber piece this tight relies on. Starnone, for his part, has become reliable screen material: Daniele Luchetti opened the Venice festival in 2020 with The Ties, adapted from Starnone’s Lacci, and returned to the author in 2024. Scherzetto continues that run, but hands the material to a director who treats Naples less as scenery than as a character in its own right.

That the film sits out of competition rather than in the Golden Lion race says little about its weight and much about how the festival balances its programme: a Servillo–Martone reunion drawn from a major contemporary novelist is a headline title wherever it lands. Scherzetto runs 105 minutes and is produced by MAD Entertainment with Rai Cinema, EDI Effetti Digitali Italiani and Picomedia, ahead of its Italian theatrical release.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Toni Servillo, Domenico Starnone, Mario Martone, Scherzetto

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