He was my father: Tommaso Romanelli’s tribute to his father Andrea. Here’s how No More Trouble was born
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Night, Atlantic Ocean, April 3, 1998, 2:40 a.m., 380 miles west of Lizard Point, Cornwall. There is an Italian boat, theOpen 60 Fila, which is crumbling the Atlantic crossing record from west to east and is about 24 hours from the finish line.
On board are Giovanni Soldini, Guido Broggi, Bruno Laurent, Andrea Tarlarini, and engineer and designer Andrea Romanelli. It was the night that took away with its storm a brilliant designer and dreamy sailor, opening a wound in the history of Italian sailing. It was a wave defined as a “pyramid” wave that overturned Fila and tore her mast to pieces. Andrea Romanelli and Andrea Tarlarini are on duty in the cockpit, the rest of the crew is inside. To get back on board through the aft safety hatch, the two men must unbuckle their safety belts, exit the cockpit with the boat upside down, and reach the safety door. But only Tarlarini succeeds; Andrea Romanelli remains missing.
No More Trouble, Tommaso Romanelli ‘s debut feature, Tucker Film, is a son’s delicate tribute to his father. And, perhaps, it is a documentary film that somehow wants to soothe that wound and help the protagonists make peace with that night off Lizard Point. No More Trouble leaves a sense of bitterness in the mouth that is hard to swallow because of the genuine anguish and sense of hopelessness of some moments in the narrative. But it also leaves the excitement of listening to the thoughts of a man who in the boundless expanses of the Ocean had realized his dreams and found himself.
There are stories that perhaps need time to be told because of the deep pain they leave in those left behind. This is one of them; it has been waiting for more than 20 years. Waiting for the right person to come along and tell it, Tommaso Romanelli, Andrea’s son. Tommaso Romanelli was 4 years old at the time of the accident; he rediscovered his father as an adult, through videos of that last Atlantic crossing. And he wanted to tell the story with this unique film.
If you get a chance to watch it, you will remember this story and the one written…No More Trouble.
The memory of Tommaso Romanelli
Tommaso Romanelli : In 1979 my father Andrea was 16 years old when he first saw American Express in a photo, in the pages of the Journal of Sailing. American Mini #17, the father of all modern minis, the first prototype to win the Mini Transat.
I have no memories of my father, so I can only imagine what he thought of her when he first saw her. From what I was told, he was an impetuous guy, a little impetuous. He liked speed. Probably even at such a young age he recognized the beautiful forms of an efficient boat, capable of great feats. That boat, wooden, wider than the others, is the fastest, someday when I grow up I will buy it, he must have thought.
He was the youngest brother of three, and sailing had always been there. Their father Guido, an engineer, had always taken them sailing. First on dinghies, then on his Alpa S, a 6-meter. I imagine this enthusiastic man, one outing after another, trying to make them understand the workings of that object made of wood and resin, metals and fabrics, which allows, using only the propulsive force of the wind, to move across a stretch of sea. Andrea and his brother Marco were hooked. Soon they had become independent, able to manage the boat on their own, to go out to the open sea and into the unknown.
I like to imagine those days when teenage Andrea was sailing who knows where, trying to take the boat to the max, dreaming of growing up, finally buying American Express, crossing the ocean. There was not only the goal of attaining good technical competence, there was not only the desire to glide over the waves, to design a beautiful boat, there was something more in that love of the sea of his. There was a willingness to remain in that sense of fragility one feels when one is at the helm, in silence, perhaps at night, far from everyone, alone with oneself, separated by a few millimeters of the hull from the black flows of the sea.
I knew virtually nothing about this passion of his, which I can only now glimpse a little, and I knew nothing about it.I knew from my mom’s stories that Andrea had been a sailor and a designer. I knew that he had loved us very, very much, that he had died at sea when I was four years old but that he would be with us forever. I didn’t feel like asking questions, either about how he had started sailing or how he had died. Sailing was never my passion, my mom is not a sailor, and there was never anyone who approached me about it.
The finding
It all started with a discovery. In my room, on the lowest shelf of the bookcase, were about 30 videotapes of my father’s that I had never watched or could not remember ever watching.Some had handwritten labels on them, indicating the names of, I presumed, various boats or races: “America’s Cup 1991,” “World Contender 1993,” “Brooksfield,” “Tencara 1992.” The similarity between that handwriting, which I imagined to be my father’s, and my own, made me smile. It is an all-capital handwriting, a bit childish and vaguely hurried. I wasn’t looking for anything, I was just tidying up, but those writings had intrigued me. They were regular America’s Cup TV broadcasts. I looked for a while, and in the meantime I searched among the other tapes to see if there were any more interesting labels. There were two black cassettes, with no writing on the case. I opened them, and on the edge they both had a small white label: “Atlantic Record 1998 1” and “Atlantic Record 1998 2.”
I remember a sense of estrangement that is hard to explain in words when I first watched them. They flowed images of a gray sea, a white boat, five sailors all harnessed in red oilskins in the middle of the storm. The sea gets bigger and bigger, the sky darker, a hand has to clean the lens, full of water, to keep filming. At one point the camera slowly zooms in on the helmsman, his gaze fixed inside the lens, the sea rising dizzily behind him. It was there that I recognized him. He had the same look as me.
The filming goes on. The sea continues to rise, a big wave, then the picture goes to black. It all seemed surreal to me. I rewound the tape and had a tightness in my belly, a mixture of joy and fright, my mind in a whirlwind of thoughts and questions. I realized that those were the last images of Andrea, that I really knew almost nothing about him, about that boat, about those other people who were with him.
Over the next four years my life changed profoundly. I decided to go and meet the people who had shared life and work with my father, with whom I had not spoken in 25 years. First his brother Marco, then Giovanni, the captain of FILA, the boat Andrea had designed when he was 34 and on which he had passed away. Just from their looks alone I recognized something very deep, a love for this father that I had hardly known, an awe at the physical resemblance between him and me, the enormous pain that his disappearance had left behind.
They told me the story of a passion, of a love for the sea and for boats, they took me into that world that I did not know and that my father had inhabited. It was a long story, new characters and new boats kept appearing. That’s how I got to know Andrea Tarlarini, Guido Broggi and Bruno Laurent and the FILA team, the designers he had worked with, Jean-Marie Finot, Pascal Conq, Guillaume Verdier, the meteorologist Pierre Lasnier. Each of them was a master in a specific area of ocean sailing, so it allowed me to reconstruct the story in more and more detail, from a new perspective. Even my mom’s words, which all my life had been the only real conduit between Andrea and me, became even richer, more complex: faces were being given to names, places and objects that had previously dwelt only in her stories were materializing, the emotions so intense that she had described to me I was beginning to experience them too. It’s one thing to talk about something, it’s another to experience it, to experience it with your eyes and your body. And then there were the boats. FILA was still there, abandoned in France after making 3 trips around the world. And American Express was still there too: my Uncle Marco had bought her back to put her back together. In 1979 they had discovered her in the Giornale della Vela, in 1993 with my father, the same age I am today, they had bought her and Andrea had done the Mini Transat on her, getting the best result ever for an Italian, and now she was in Monfalcone, out of the water. When I saw it I couldn’t believe it, it looked too good to be true. That shell of wood and resin, the beginning of the whole story, was there, and my Uncle Marco was just waiting for me to come back and give him a hand to sail her back.
It was as if the story suddenly became real and concrete. My father’s story had become my story, those people who had been just names had become flesh-and-blood people, the boats had become concrete objects that seemed to ask to be brought back to sail. Even the photographs, the films, the printed words, were changing, gradually gaining more meaning, telling more and more.
A thousand questions opened up for me: who was Andrea? What had driven him in his life? What was he like as a child, and who had he become as an adult? With whom had he shared his dreams? How had he felt about my mother, and about me? What boats had he sailed, built, designed? What were those boats that made up his world made of?
A little bit it was sad, knowing that person I had not been able to meet, imagining the life we were going to live together, realizing that I didn’t know how to do anything with my own hands to put those boats back in seaworthy condition. Somewhat instead, it was beautiful, and it gave me a very deep sense of peace, to see him happy, a person with a clear goal and the ambition to achieve it, who had had the courage to realize his dream, to build the fastest boat in the world, loving the sea so much that he went so far as to disappear into it.
Not all of us have such a clear and indispensable dream. As a child, the things I liked to do most were going to the movies and reading. I was a person who was very much inside my own head, I didn’t have much interest in speed or competition, I didn’t have much practical sense or desire to build things. I liked stories and images, and somewhat shyly I dreamed of being a filmmaker, of telling stories myself. But I couldn’t find a story that made sense to tell, so I didn’t tell anyone and kept telling myself that maybe one day I would find the right story.
To rediscover my father’s life, and to enter into it, was also to find myself. For the first time, I felt that I had found a story that I had to tell at all costs, as if those images, laden with nostalgia, pain, and joy, were begging to enter a narrative that could only have the form of a film.
It was as if Andrea had left me a story that needed to be told and that only I could tell. As if that love that had given meaning to his life was there, scattered among memories, among written words and photographs, films and tapes, inside those boats that had survived him, waiting to come alive again, transformed into something new.
By Tommaso Romanelli, edited by Mauro Giuffrè
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