Marina Puricelli Has a Business Plan for Venice

When you think of Tilda Swinton, you don't think of her absorbed in a conversation about family business. Yet this is exactly what she discussed in the spring of 2008 at a hotel on Corso Como in Milan, where casting for I Am Love took place, a movie directed by Luca Guadagnino that was recently presented in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival. Another person at the casting, acting as a film consultant, was Marina Puricelli, a specialist in family business at Bocconi and SDA.

"I've been in contact with the director since 2007," the professor explains. The movie revolves around three generations of a family of entrepreneurs in Lombardy, the Recchis, struggling with inheritance, among other things. "The director gave me the screenplay and came to visit me at the University to discuss several aspects. Just to be clear: the movie's about passion, love and emotions and I wasn't involved in the plot. Guadagnino asked me to make the aspects involving the company, the business and inheritance more realistic. At the beginning we had a hard time making our two different backgrounds mesh, but then something clicked with the idea that the different characters' ideas about business are conflicting, with the grandfather Edoardo Sr. backed by the grandson Edoardo Jr., and the father Trancredi agreeing with the other grandson Gianluca."

Edoardo Sr., a first-generation entrepreneur, had a manufacturing vision based on work and specialization, with roots in the local area and strong connections with employees, sometimes a little paternalistic. Tancredi has a finance business in mind, however, listing securities in the stock market with a speculative vision. In the short-term, he would like to see delocalization, diversification in East European real estate and he is indifferent towards his employees.

"When we began talking, the crisis hadn't broken out yet," explains Puricelli. "But the idea was to make it clear that the second model doesn't work anywhere. And in fact, the best heirs who I've worked with in the past 17 years in the SDA course From Father to Son are going back to first-generation ideas. The crisis has confirmed this diagnosis."

Compared to the original text she was given, Puricelli suggested changing one of the character's ages (a chief executive was originally written to be just twenty years old) and, mostly, the language. "The script used some stereotypical US public company language, which is different from what's used every day by Italian entrepreneurs, who get up every morning and go to 'the firm' or 'the plant' and not to 'the business' or 'the company' and they don't talk about 'holdings' for example. Limousines all over Milan were also considered, but we substituted them with more realistic high powered cars." The professor also helped select the right settings. "They had already chosen Villa Necchi Campiglio in Milan, which is perfect, but then they asked me where their characters could go to eat out in the city, or where the young people could do sports or go shopping. To get into the part, the actors visited all these places. I suggested using a lovely plant in Varano Borghi, near Varese, for the factory, and also to film at Mandello Lario, one of the places where many Milanese bourgeoisie families still have holiday homes. We also discussed body language with Pippo Delbono, who plays Tancredi."

Other than the casting on Corso Como, Puricelli was also invited to a day of shooting at Villa Necchi ("a beautiful setting" she says) and then she only got sporadic news of the movie for a year. "I still haven't seen it," she says, "and it will premiere in Milan at the beginning of October. I'm really curious to see how the entrepreneurial aspect has been portrayed. From that point of view, the reviews from Venice talked about the consistency of its style, which was delightful. When our two worlds met, I changed my mind about some stereotypes in cinema and I hope that they did the same with economics and the University."