Un very affectionate portrait, the one dedicated to Gianni Agnelli twenty years after his death, in which the three nephews John, Lapo and Ginevra play a fundamental role; a portrait that involves relatives, friends, collaborators, football players, workers and journalists to remember Fiat, Juventus, the power of business, the relationship with politics, but also the taste for beauty, engines, Ferrari, the cult of sailing and skiing. Marco Durante, in collaboration with Rai Documentari, produced «Gianni Agnelli, aka the Lawyer», written by Stefano Cappellini, Emanuele Imbucci and Dario Sardelli and directed by Imbucci himself (Rai3). Beyond the anecdotes, often loaded with a fabulous aura (the elegance, the jokes, the spattering, the women), the tragic events as well as the gossip, the brief history of Italian capitalism is inevitably intertwined with the history of the Agnellis, Gianni in particular, according to the famous phrase “what’s good for Fiat is good for Italy”.
Unlike the Nick Hooker documentary «Agnelli» by HBO, which represented the point of view of Americans on one of the most charismatic figures of our country, «Gianni Agnelli, aka the lawyer» looks like a family album (many images are from the Centro Storico Fiat ), almost a private story attentive not only to important events (participation in World War II, taking command of the company, the challenge to terrorism with the decision not to leave Turin, the Fiat crisis) but also to the most personal, those that are usually classified as facts of costume or fashion. The famous twenty years on the French Riviera, which to many seemed like a long social holiday, actually served him to build an international aura, to lay the foundations of the “character”, if not of the myth. The most curious testimony? Michel Platini’s.