Cycling legend Giuseppi Marinoni handcrafts another of his thirty thousand bike frames in his Montreal workshop
MARINONI: THE FIRE IN THE FRAME (Tony Girardin, 2014)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, April 1
212-924-3363
www.marinonimovie.com
www.cinemavillage.com
In Tony Girardin’s debut feature-length documentary, Marinoni: The Fire in the Frame, friends and colleagues of Giuseppi Marinoni’s describe the Italian Canadian cycling legend as “explosive,” “authentic,” “iconoclastic,” “hard-headed,” and “cantankerous,” and the film shows him to be all that and more. Born in Bergamo, Italy, in 1937, Marinoni became a champion cyclist in his home country, then moved to Montreal in the mid-1960s after participating in races there. After he retired from racing, he turned his attention to building bicycle frames, training in Italy with Mario Rossin before opening his own business in Montreal in 1974, where he gained renown as a master craftsman. But he doesn’t necessarily like to talk about his life and career; it took the Montreal-based Girardin three years to convince Marinoni to agree to be filmed, and it’s clear that the septuagenarian is never fully comfortable being onscreen, whether building one of his coveted frames — he’s made more than thirty thousand, all by hand — or training to break the hour record for his age group, seventy-five to seventy-nine, a solo competition in which a cyclist attempts to go the farthest distance in sixty minutes. “Marinoni embodies what I love most about cycling: passion,” Girardin says at the start of the film. “It’s a culmination of life, love, and many things, but ultimately the challenge is to ride as far as is humanly possible.” Marinoni might never warm up to the camera — “You watching me is stressful!” he says to Girardin in French (he also speaks Italian but not English) — but other cyclists, promoters, and bike shop owners can’t wait to gush over how much they admire the man and his frames. Among those singing his praises are Andy Lamarre, Colette Pépin, Ken MacDonald, Julie Marceau, Federico Corneli, Marian Jago, Charle Lamarre, Marissa Plamondon-Lu, and Rossin.
Seventy-five-year-old Giuseppi Marinoni prepares to take on the hour record for his age group in Montreal
Girardin also speaks extensively with Canadian champion Jocelyn Lovell, who was paralyzed after being hit by a truck while training in 1983. For his spring 2012 attempt to break the hour record, Marinoni decides to use a frame he built forty years before, the same one that Lovell won numerous medals on back in 1978. Girardin, who has made such documentary shorts as David Francey: Burning Bright and Hoppy the Deer, directed, produced, photographed, and edited Marinoni, which features a score by Canadian musician Alexander Hackett. “Tell me your life story,” Girardin says to Marinoni early on. “You’re wasting your time and money,” Marinoni declares. The film is a charming little tale about a rather ornery individual who has accomplished extraordinary things but doesn’t want to deal with the ensuing fuss and fame, slyly refusing to acknowledge what all the bother is about. Marinoni: The Fire in the Frame opens April 1 at Cinema Village, with Girardin in New York for screenings all week to talk about the film and his remarkable subject. “It was like luring a mythical creature from its den, and being lucky enough to have a camera on hand to capture it,” Girardin notes in his director’s statement.