The story of Maria José of Savoy, who served as queen of Italy after World War II for only 27 days before Italians voted to abolish the monarchy, is set to be the subject of a new historical drama. Titled “Maestà” (“Majesty”), the film will be directed by Ginevra Elkann (“If Only”) and is based on an idea by Italy’s revered auteur Marco Bellocchio, who will co-write the screenplay.
The daughter of Albert I, the King of Belgium, Maria José married Italy’s Prince Umberto II, whose father, King Vittorio Emanuele III, cooperated with fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. She became known as “the May Queen” because she and her husband reigned for just 27 days in 1946, from May 9 — when Victor Emanuel III abdicated in favor of his son, hoping to save the throne for the House of Savoy during the turmoil after Mussolini’s fall — until June 2, when Italians voted to abolish the monarchy and the Savoys went into exile.
Known to be a rebellious royal and a surreptitious anti-fascist, Maria José then moved to Portugal and soon left her husband. The film will provide an opportunity for Italians to revisit their fascist past through the unique lens of a non-Italian woman chosen by fate to briefly serve as the country’s last queen.
“I’ve often thought of Maria José, the ‘May Queen,’ [in terms of] the majesty that she had certainly dreamed of since she was a child,” Bellocchio said in a statement. “The majesty that she had been destined for by her parents, the king and queen, the royals of Belgium, who were very democratic. This fairy tale was dramatically shattered by her marriage to Prince Umberto. The brutality of fascism, the racial laws, the atrocities of war that, until that May, had been devoid of dreams, but perhaps still harbored some illusions.”
Bellocchio, whose recent credits include Mafia drama “The Traitor” (released in the U.S. by Sony) and HBO’s “Portobello” TV series, will co-write the “Maestà” screenplay with director Elkann and her regular collaborator Chiara Barzini. “Maestà” is a Kavac Film project, produced by Simone Gattoni.
Elkann, who is a granddaughter of former Fiat automaker chief Gianni Agnelli, is a London Film School graduate who worked as an assistant to Bernardo Bertolucci and Anthony Minghella. She made her directorial debut with “Magari” (“If Only”), a semi-autobiographical comedy about the disconnect felt by kids with divorced parents that opened the Locarno Film Festival in 2019. She followed with the black comedy “I Told You So” that launched from Toronto in 2023. Her upcoming third film, “Leila,” is set in the famous Agnelli estate in Marrakech known as Aïn Kassimou, and stars Fanny Ardant.
In her directors’ statement, Elkann (pictured above, right) described Maria José of Savoy as “an intelligent, cultured woman, born and prepared to reign,” underlining that “she was indeed a queen, but only for a few weeks.”
The film will recount the month of May 1946, “suspended between her rise to the throne and the referendum that ended the monarchy,” she said.
“Everything is concentrated in those weeks: her hopes and doubts,” Elkann continued. “The rift between wanting to be queen and the realization, day after day, that the conditions for doing so are no longer there.”
She added: “Her tragedy is not her defeat, but her [growing] awareness: the realization that she was born for something that will never happen. To tell the story of Maria José means showing the end of a world through the face of a single person — with respect for her intelligence, and without nostalgia nor condemnation.”
Commented Barzini: “How can you not love a character dramatically on the threshold of an irreversible historical transformation? I’m interested in women and men who witness the end of a world; who perceive its cracks and decline, but who remain emotionally tied to it. Maria José belongs to this category of suspended figures.”
She added, “Modern, cultured, anti-fascist and politically lucid, she understands that after the catastrophe of war, continuing to cling on to the illusions of monarchy is now anachronistic. Yet she also remains the young Belgian princess who had dreamed of Italy since childhood. In this sense, the film not only recounts the end of the Italian monarchy, but also the universal difficulty of separating ourselves from the image we have constructed of our destiny. It will be fascinating to explore this internal oscillation through the daily life, gestures and thoughts of those few weeks as queen.”
Kavac Film is the Rome-based production company founded in 1997 by Bellocchio and Francesca Calvelli that is led by Simone Gattoni, who serves as CEO. Their recent projects include Bellocchio’s “Portobello” series with HBO Max, Gianni Amelio’s upcoming “No Pain,” Bellocchio’s next project “Falcon” about late auto industry executive Sergio Marchionne and Giuseppe Tornatore’s “The First Dollar,” a biopic of Bank of America founder Amedeo Peter Giannini.
