“Marca Budavari” is back in Rome: “Today I train the masters, but in Italy I am always the one of Palombella Rossa”
The mustache has turned white, as has the hair. Compared to thirty-two years ago there is an extra goatee, but in general it hasn’t changed much compared to Palombella rossa. “Imre Budavari, a Hungarian player. Discreet player, but nothing more, you mark him “.” No, I’m afraid. “Thus began the water polo match of the film by Nanni Moretti, where the coach Silvio Orlando assigned the champion to mark the opposing champion greeted a moment before with these words: “Imre, how are you old lion? Let’s try to have a good game, without unnecessary cruelty”. A symbolic match, in the 1989 film that recounted the crisis of the Italian left set in a water polo pool. With a remarkable cast (Moretti and Orlando, in fact, then Asia Argento and Marco Messeri), and a champion who played himself at that time, Imre Budavari, who has returned to Rome these days as the coach of a 55+ category water polo team , the Sunday boys. One of the many appearances of the European Master following the triumphs of Pilato, Paltrinieri & C. in mid-August. An opportunity to see so many protagonists of swimming in the Eighties and Nineties, and in this case a piece of the history of Italian cinema.
“For a long time, when I arrive in Italy they have always repeated” Budavari brand, Budavari brand “, the Hungarian told those who met him at the Polo Natatorio in Ostia, with the blue T-shirt and the logo of the Colosseum in Rome 2022.” Marca Budavari “is not the call of a coach when he played, but the desperate and useless cry of Silvio Orlando to the Monteverde players overwhelmed in the swimming pool of the Acireale spa.” I have a good memory of the film, by Silvio Orlando, which is a great actor, and also of Nanni Moretti, whom I thank for choosing me at the time “he says today.” I don’t remember many details of that period because so many years have passed, but I was impressed by the feeling that was created between actors and water polo players during the recording. On that occasion, friendships were born, and this was a very beautiful thing. Every now and then I also take pleasure in the film. “Memories by now distant, but very clear, when we talk about the qualities of Nanni Moretti in the tub. Or the pain of the disappearance of Mauro Maugeri, in the film coach of Acireale, in the life of the Setterosa coach from 2006 to 2008 before a long illness that took him away in 2017: “We talked a lot about water polo during the shooting. When I learned of Mauro’s illness and his disease has disappeared a lot “.
Water polo is one of Moretti’s loves, and the strong political content of the film, one of the director’s masterpieces, found among the performers a player who experienced the years of the cold war and boycotts on his skin. That of the Soviet bloc at the Los Angeles Olympics, including Hungary, as a nation and as a team that had won a World Cup in 1979, a silver medal at the Guyaquil World Cup in 1982 and a European silver in Rome in 1983: “The Soviet Union that had beaten us was the only team stronger than us,” Budavari recalls. “In Los Angeles he had the chance to get a good result, but unfortunately politics made this joke on us. I’m sorry when politics enters sport, because sport is something else, which always unites even political enemies. “.
The “old lion”, as Silvio Orlando called him, can no longer play today (“My body cannot follow what my head would like to do”) but runs and has fun with the master athletes: “Because in addition to satisfaction of water polo there are friendship and a lot of fun that unite us “. Italy is the memory (“a really nice memory”) of another life: “Two years in Arenzano, two in Nervi and another two in Porto Santo Stefano at the Rari Nantes Argentario. In Italy I finished university, but things are changing in Hungary and I thought it would be better to return to my country to pursue a career as a lawyer “. Returning to Rome these days, he has discovered that no one can take away even his past as an actor.