I do worry sometimes why a film that has been widely-praised can leave me absolutely cold. That is the case with this Italian picture which apparently won three awards in Cannes (I know not what). The story is set on a small and scenic fishing island near Sicily and the heroine played by Valeria Golino, a mother of three, is considered tetched because she swims naked in the sea and occasionally has a fit of the screaming habdabs; the villagers think she should go to Milan (why Milan?) for treatment. After she disappears (with the connivance of her elder son) and is thought dead everyone feels rotten and they are overjoyed when she is found to be alive. Frankly I thought the whole village were a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
I have previously seen Ms. Golino in English-speaking roles and was never taken with her as a talent, but my indifference to this film is not really down to her. The whole exercise seemed a little pointless to me -- perhaps it was an attempt to recapture the realist films of the Italian post-WW2 period.
2 comments:
I saw this is the cinema originally and was blown away, and now have it on DVD. It's base is characterisation rather than plot. Don't expect great things to happen. What makes it is the slow pace - the way the characters lives draw you in, and the glorious underwater sequences set against music. It's the trial of love, seen from so many different angles. You're sitting there in the cinema and you can really feel the Sicilian sun burning down on you.....
What is wrong with a repeat of neo-realism. Compared with 'The Tree of Wooden
Clogs', Olmi's masterpiece, this is action-filled but a better comparison is perhaps
with 'La Terra Trema' because of the similarity of background. What makes this
film different is that it has a female lead rather than a male one. Golino shows
that the tripe she appeared in in Hollywood did not take the edge of her considerable acting talent.
Michael
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