Synopsis
Felice Andreasi would have liked to be a painter, but fate — or that particularly perverse form of it we call success — turned him into an actor and comedian. At Milan’s Derby Club, alongside Enzo Jannacci, Cochi and Renato and other protagonists of Italian comedy, he developed a surreal, grotesque, corrosive, often politically incorrect kind of comedy. And yet, behind the public persona, Andreasi continued to paint. For him, painting was not another profession, but a form of freedom. Through archival material, testimonies and memories of those who knew him, Io sono felice by Michael Zampino and Antonio De Lucia reconstructs the figure of an artist who seems to have spent his life escaping the image others had built of him.
Review
4 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 19. September 2026
One fine day I was born. Immediately, I didn’t notice a thing. But after a while, they pointed it out to me.
Felice Andreasi did not want to be a comedian. It is probably the funniest thing one can say about a comedian: becoming famous precisely by doing what one considers almost an accident along the way. Fame, after all, has a particular talent for confusing vocations with professions.
Io sono felice by Michael Zampino and Antonio De Lucia begins with this misunderstanding and turns it into the centre of its story. Andreasi was an actor, a writer, a cabaret performer, a companion on the journey with Jannacci, Cochi and Renato; but all of this, within his own hierarchy of existence, seems to have belonged to a secondary order. Painting was the serious thing. The rest could last one night.
And indeed, Guido Ceronetti’s phrase — acting lasts one night, painting a lifetime — could be taken as the film’s small philosophical formula. On one side there is the actor, exposed to the gaze of others, compelled to exist within the brief time of performance; on the other, the painter, alone before the canvas, freed from the need to please. The first belongs to others. The second returns to himself.
The contradiction is even more interesting because Andreasi’s comedy was anything but accommodating. It was surreal, cynical, grotesque, corrosive. Sarcinelli recalls the very lack of conformity that, paradoxically, makes him contemporary: Andreasi was uncomfortable because he seemed to have no interest in making himself marketable. He was not seeking transgression as a pose; he seemed to embody it almost against his own will. And perhaps that is the difference between those who perform political incorrectness and those who simply never learned to ask for permission.
Cederna compares him to the eccentric characters of Chekhov; Chiesa speaks of melancholy, irony, torment and tragedy. These definitions prevent the documentary from reducing him to nostalgia for the Derby Club. Because in Andreasi, comedy seems to emerge precisely where tragedy begins. We laugh because life is absurd, not because it is funny.
His painting, too, as recounted by Angelo Mistrangelo, appears less like a second identity than the first and definitive one. Expressionist, free, private, detached from the need to be immediately understood. Andreasi would even use scripts as paper on which to test his colours: as if the painter could finally use the actor to erase him. The material of the role becomes the material of the canvas.
The documentary does not therefore construct a holy card of a forgotten artist, but a more ambiguous and therefore more interesting figure: a melancholic, brooding, affectionate, faithful, tormented man, capable of fierce comedy and of a form of painting in which he sought his own freedom. His wife’s testimony, together with those of people who knew him professionally, brings back a man who seems to have needed very little of an audience and very few people, as long as they were the right ones.
In this sense, Io sono felice is also a film about fame as a misunderstanding. Andreasi is remembered for what he did in front of others, while he seemed to regard as authentic what he did when others were not there. The actor remained in the memory; the painter remained with him.
And perhaps this is where the title acquires its most subtle irony. Io sono felice does not seem so much like the statement of a happy man as the name of a man who found, in painting, a way of finally being simply Felice. Not necessarily happy, then. Felice, and nothing more.
Massimo Fedeli’s music accompanies this figure without overwhelming it, allowing the film to unfold through fragments, memories and images. Because in the end, Andreasi seems to elude even the documentary attempting to tell his story: what remains is that strange figure of an artist who experienced celebrity without ever truly desiring it, and chose painting precisely because it promised no applause.
Acting gave him a character. Painting gave him a life back.
I need to be a painter, whereas I act because it amuses me.
