Ennio the Alien | A Review

Conditions surrounding Luisa—known as Lè-Lè, the daughter of Ennio Flaiano, the great writer and screenwriter still too often misunderstood—were well documented. She suffered from a severe form of encephalitis. So too was Fellini's terrible remark documented: "Why don't they lock her away?" The words that ended a professional and personal partnership between two men. Yet Flaiano's relationship with Lè-Lè has typically been treated as a dark shadow, a void that deepened his melancholic and fatalistic character. With their biography, Minore and Pansa enlarge the story—one deserving of deeper investigation still—and what emerges is a tender father, attentive to every detail, capable of building with Lè-Lè a dialogue made of touch and parallel breaths. He spoke of it rarely, guarded and reserved. But Flaiano learned early to "accept the child with her delicate difference." It was not easy—especially given the intellectual friends who gathered at their Fregene home, distant and embarrassed, unable even to acknowledge her with a nod. Yet it happened.