'Papaya 69': the friendship and redemption of two girls on the margins

One is a single mother on the run from the past. The other is a bewildered former teen star. Their destinies intertwine in Riccardo Bernasconi and Francesca Reverdito's Papaya 69, which now arrives in our cinemas. As Studio Aparagus, the pair of directors from Ticino made short films such as Death for a Unicorn - presented at numerous European festivals starting with the Venice Film Festival in 2013 - or the web series La stirpe di Orazio. Papaya 69 is their first feature film. Produced by Pic Film in co-production with RSI and supported by the Ticino Film Commission, it stars Italian actresses Rosanna Sparapano and Valentina Violo, Bulgarian Leart Dokle and a cast of mostly Ticino and Swiss actors such as Teco Celio and Bruno Todeschini in the lead roles.

"Right from the start, we wanted to tell a story about a friendship between two girls, let's say minor league," explains Riccardo Bernasconi, "two girls who have to conquer everything they aspire to and have to do so with more effort than others, because they come from two pasts that put them at a disadvantage. The basic idea was this. We always like to tell stories about 'losers', we say this in quotes, meaning people who don’t fit into society. We’re not so interested in heroes, the strong ones, those who have their ideas straight and already know what they want from life. We like those who are more insecure, marginalised, those who are a bit borderline'.

Certainly on the fringes are the characters Eva (Sparapano) and Rainbow (Violo). The former tries to recover her relationship with her daughter, entrusted to an elderly couple to escape an unhealthy affair. The second also has to somehow come to terms with a very peculiar past. As a young girl, she was a TV star in a children's show in the style of Love Me Licia (the Italian TV series that revisited the Japanese cartoon Kiss Me Licia in the 1980s). Once she grows up, while futilely looking for acting roles, in order to make ends meet she and her friend Ruby (Dokle) hustle as cam girls, playing online the role that made her famous but in an adult, sexy version. 'Yes,' laughs Francesca, 'the inspiration is precisely Kiss Me Licia, where from a Japanese cartoon a slightly trashy TV show was made. It represents the imagery that existed in our childhood and was the starting point for Papaya 69. We too imagined a cartoon from which a TV series was later made, the one in which Rainbow in the story was the protagonist. We, however, take it a step further because Rainbow, when she grows up, does a hotter version of it and the same viewers of that time, now grown up like her, watch her in other clothes, a bit skimpier".

"Our films have never been 100 per cent realistic," continues the director, who also designed the sets and costumes, as well as the screenplay together with Riccardo. "Our settings are always a little invented, not everyday, not entirely contemporary, not 100 per cent modern. In all our works there is always a mix of styles. So, even the characters are never realistic in the strict sense, we glamorise them every time with a bit of fantasy'.

'Eva is more closed, harder,' Riccardo resumes, 'she has wrapped herself in armour. Rainbow, on the other hand, is a bit more naive. What was clear to us from the beginning was that we would have liked to work with Rosanna and Valentina. We have known them for a long time, and we wrote with them in mind. Some of the character traits are inspired by what the two of them are like in reality. Valentina has never played comedy parts and the same goes for Leart. Especially in Bulgaria, Leart is an actor known for dramatic roles. He played Bratya, where he is a boxer entangled with the underworld, and in England he took part in a landmark title like Coronation Street. Both he and Valentina discovered in our project that they have a comedy vein that works very well". "We," continues Riccardo, "like films that mix the two genres, comedy and drama, and if they manage to bring them to a slightly unreal level, so much the better. A bit like those films that were successful at the Sundance Festival, things like Little Miss Sunshine or Me, Earl and The Dying Girl or even British comedies like Sing Street'.

Set in an urban underbelly with offbeat characters and where redemption, or better still salvation, can come in unexpected ways, Papaya 69 is a bittersweet suburban comedy. "We have always thought of our projects," continues Riccardo, "starting from what we have, from the areas we know, hence from the suburbs where we live. Of the six weeks of filming, two were spent in our Ticino, between Mendrisio and Chiasso, while the first two were spent in Piedmont - where we mainly shot the interiors of Rainbow's house - and the last just over the border, in the Como area'.

The gestation has been long. The filming, initially scheduled to start in 2020, was postponed by a good 14 months due to the pandemic and the lockdown. Presented for the first time last January at the Solothurn Film Days, Papaya 69 has meanwhile passed through the Sofia Film Festival, then the Festival Internacional de cine de Cuenca, in Ecuador and the Giffoni Macedonia Youth Film Festival. Now it arrives in Ticino theatres. After the previews on Tuesday 7 November at the Cinema Teatro in Mendrisio and Thursday 9 November at the Lux in Massagno, in two screenings, starting at 8.30 p.m., where the directors and cast will also be present, the film will be screened in various cinemas in our region. A release in some Italian cinemas is also planned, with Varese and Como already confirmed.

FC