Dir. Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy/France, 2009, 150 mins, in Sicilian/Italian with subtitles
Cast: Francesco Scianna, Margareth Madè
Review by Carol Allen
Tornatore was 32 when his second feature film Cinema Paradiso(1988) became a huge and still affectionately remembered international hit. Now some twenty years later he returns once more to his past and his native Sicily to trace the story from the twenties to the eighties of his home town Bagheria, affectionately know to the locals as Baarìa in a sprawling and somewhat inconclusive epic.
The framework for its telling is theoretically three generations of one family. Cicco the grandfather (Gaetano Aronica) is a shepherd at the time of the rise of fascism. The story though concentrates far more on his son Peppino (Scianna), who as a boy experiences the hardships of World War II and as a young man becomes a fervent communist. This creates difficulties when he falls in love with the beautiful Mannina (Madè), as her parents object to his politics but eventually he wins her hand, they marry, have children and he climbs slowly but surely up the ladder of the local Communist party structure, finally being elected a town councillor.
There are telling moments in the film, as in a scene involving a woman in the town who keeps her daughter indoors and won't let the neighbours know they are starving to death; the dance where Peppino first meets Mannina, where the boys are all on one side of the room and the girls on the other and a delightful strand in which an artist paints all the locals into a mural on the church wall, which is all a bit shocking and many years later is painted over by an uptight priest. Politically it covers a really interesting period with many of the locals worshipping Il Duce, followed by the reverse in the post war rise of communism. The film though never seems to get to grips with either the politics or the characters but just sort of vaguely meanders on. Scianna makes a very handsome central character but one never really gets inside his head apart from occasional moments, as in one scene with his teenage daughter in the sixties, where he has that familiar row with her about her skirt being too short, and in his relationship with his small son, who is always asking questions. There are a few shadowy Mafia figures in the background, whose power is referred to but we never see much of it in action, and a rather baffling opening scene, which is returned to later, involving one of those beautiful Sicilian small boys being sent to buy cigarettes.
The real star, one feels, as far as the director is concerned is the town of Baarìa . The action never moves away from it, as on the couple of occasions, when Peppino goes away to seek work and then to visit the Soviet Union . We don't go with him but stay in the town with his wife awaiting his return and don't really hear anything much about what he's been up to while away. What the film does do very effectively is show the evolution of Baarìa itself, from a peaceful and sleepy small town to bustling, traffic choked modernity. And it all looks very lovely. But in two and a half hours one would expect to get to know the characters, their lives and in this case their politics in intimate detail. The film fails to give us that experience. |
