I think I'll maintain a neutral stance on this one. It may be good, or it may be bad, but listening to Italians speaking in English in Italy makes the whole thing more of a pastiche than it really is. My review really stops here but as only a minimum of ten lines qualifies as a review, here is some waffle which you may ignore if you choose to. If you read the book already you may be disappointed. If you haven't, and really feel that you need to know what the secret of Santa Vitoria is you have the choice of either reading the book which is enjoyable but takes a longer time, or seeing the film, especially if you are the kind of person that doesn't like subtitles and don't mind listening to Italian peasants, all with a gift for foreign languages.
Reviews
7 Reviews
Hope Springs
(2012)
Too didactic for my tastes.
26 December 2012
The problem of marriages going stale, and more, is addressed by many films, and novels. In most it is addressed indirectly: There is a story and the staleness of the marriage is an element of it. The story gives the problem a context and the problem adds depth to the story. "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf", "The Hours" each includes a different aspect of the same problem each with totally different manifestations.
This is not the case in this film. The problem is addressed head-on and every aspect of life around it disappears. There is no subtlety, no ambiguity, no tension - all is obvious, self-evident. The removal of all context makes the focus on the problem itself more dramatic, in the sense that nothing else seems to exist for the protagonists of the story. The end result is a film anatomical in nature - as anatomical as watching your belly-button can be. Worse, it appears essentially didactic and in this sense it would be insulting if it were not devastatingly boring. I gave it four stars because the two leading actors make a really brave and convincing effort to appear real, though to what purpose I am not really sure.
This is not the case in this film. The problem is addressed head-on and every aspect of life around it disappears. There is no subtlety, no ambiguity, no tension - all is obvious, self-evident. The removal of all context makes the focus on the problem itself more dramatic, in the sense that nothing else seems to exist for the protagonists of the story. The end result is a film anatomical in nature - as anatomical as watching your belly-button can be. Worse, it appears essentially didactic and in this sense it would be insulting if it were not devastatingly boring. I gave it four stars because the two leading actors make a really brave and convincing effort to appear real, though to what purpose I am not really sure.
City of Life and Death
(2009)
Warning: This film hurts
30 December 2009
I finished watching this film two hours ago and the punch in the stomach I received watching it still hurts. I don't recall having received such a punch in my 60 or so years of film watching. Unlike films such as "Schindler's List" or "Empire of the Sun", this film does not take sides. It's like a candid camera operated by an invisible grand master hidden in the crowd or the rubble. It's just there recording events. As a result, despite the fact that it focuses on the big picture, the individual is not lost: Both the Chinese and the Japanese, each and every one of them, in huge crowds are real believable characters. This gives the viewer a grand and horrible sense of presence which is what makes it so painful. It would take courage to watch it again.
Prosopo me prosopo
(1966)
A view of a nascent but divided bourgeois society
4 August 2009
I saw this film in 1966 at the Thessaloniki film festival so my memory of it may have faded a little but the fact that I still remember vividly the sharp and subtle humour and the satisfying mixture of political and social commentary and comedy says something about it. The backdrop of the film is the political unrest that followed the violation of the constitution by the then King and before the coup-d'etat of the colonels. This backdrop, however, is discreetly there in the background when the sound of demonstrations is heard in the salons of high society (a daily event then). The nouveau-riche character of Athenian high society (climbing the Acropolis at dawn to admire a view of the Hilton) is so real and it hasn't changed much. Some jokes are esoteric and would be lost today - for example the shipowner who drops a pocketful of coins on the couch (all but one of which are golden sovereigns): He keeps the sovereigns and gives the solitary drachma to the poor teacher of English sitting next to him saying "this drachma is yours". Nothing much but "this drachma is yours" was the slogan of the conservatives against the centre union party which the King had recently deposed.
The story of a woman's isolation.
6 February 2009
An outstandingly well-told story of an event lasting only a nighttime. The hero of the event is not the person playing the presumed Hemingway but the stationmaster's daughter - a modest, highly cultivated, educated and indeed wise person, liberated in most meanings of the word - trapped into a small provincial town in the aftermath of the Great War (with Bulgaria on the losing side). Impressive acting by both the beautiful Pletnyova and Chanev (playing the father/stationmaster), masterful direction by Ovcharov. Finally if I were a critic asked for which aspect should this film get an award - I would hesitatingly say for the cinematography: The story takes place in the span of a single night in a small railway station without electricity. The cinematographer managed to turn that from a potentially unnerving experience (for a whole hour and a half) to the conveyance of a magical and nearly nostalgic atmosphere. The only reason for my hesitation is that there were so many other good aspects too. I saw this film at the Thessaloniki (Greece) film festival and, as far as I know, it collected no awards at all. I cannot exclude that it may be my own judgement which is blunted - but I do so wish it were distributed so that I can see it again; I suspect it is one of those films in which you discover something each time you see it.
Hands Over the City
(1963)
Disagree with both previous comments
14 August 2008
This film is not about any aspect of human activity which is particular to Italian life. It is about the prevalence of greed and corruption over the human being and society anywhere. In this sense its value is universal - not limited to Italy. One of its strong points is precisely that it is not focused on an individual family's drama. Such focus often moves in a very superficial way - it turns the universal problem into one family's problem (and if it could be solved everything would be fine). Take a movie like "Ace in the hole". An outstanding movie, one of the best of its kind and its time (maybe of all time) and a good example of the human-focused view. You empathise with the victim, you rebel against the man (KD) but otherwise this can still be the best of all possible worlds. Not so in any of the films of Rosi. Rosi, in this more than in any other of his films, puts the collective problem, as well as the collective responsibility so clearly and so strongly to the fore that I believe this to be, maybe, the best political film of its kind ever made.
Zlaté kapradí
(1963)
A great fairy tale from a great storyteller
26 May 2005
This is the story of a woodcutter in Bohemia during a war between Austria and Turkey. Wandering in the forest he finds a golden fern whose seed turns into a beautiful young woman - they fall in love. After a village feast in which he gets drunk he gets to sign up to the army. The fairy gives him a shirt to wear and asks him to swear he will never part with it. At the war front he falls in love with the the colonels daughter; cold beauty who asks him to perform various feats in order to respond to his courting (bring her the horse of the grand-vizier, then the necklace of the grand-vizier's wife and finally his nightingale). In performing these feats he proves invulnerable to bullets, swords and other calamities - protected by the fairy's shirt. Before performing the last feat, however, the colonel's daughter asks him to throw away his ugly shirt, which he does. He returns, wounded and disguised in Turkish clothes to escape from the enemy camp. He gets arrested as a spy and condemned to death by a thousand strikes. His comrades who are assigned to throw his body at the river discover he's still alive and let him go. Returning to his village he does not find Sylvana (the fairy of the golden fern) and the film ends with him wandering in the forest shouting her name in a beautiful photograph in which the camera moves high up the trees.
This black and white film, with superb photography, is most engaging and of a unique lyricism and nearly invisible seams running across the plot The woodcutter and Sylvana dance a fast folk dance full of life at the village fair at the beginning of the film in a contest of endurance. Before the woodcutters hapless sortie to get the viziers nightingale, he finds himself in the company of officers and their women dancing an elegant and very slow minuet, all wearing identical golden masks. It is the same tune only this time it as much a herald of doom as the folk dance was the expression of love and life.
I saw this film twice about 40 years ago and did not manage to find again anywhere on any media (and lord knows I've looked). It is one of the few things whose every detail has remained vivid in my mind ever since.
The "Saragossa Manuscript" by Wojciech Has, whose plot is at about the same time, has some undertones of the "Golden Fern" but does not even begin to match either the latter's lyricism, story line or its more visual aspects such as a superb, bold and expressive photography. The expressiveness of some of the characters, such as that of a fortune teller who warns our hero against the "iron rock" he is in love with and other characters are only comparable with some of Eisenstein's or Bergman's 'designs' though without the deliberate expressionist exaggeration of the former. In fact, the strongest point of the film is the way the plot, the acting, the photography and the music bind in tight whole.
This black and white film, with superb photography, is most engaging and of a unique lyricism and nearly invisible seams running across the plot The woodcutter and Sylvana dance a fast folk dance full of life at the village fair at the beginning of the film in a contest of endurance. Before the woodcutters hapless sortie to get the viziers nightingale, he finds himself in the company of officers and their women dancing an elegant and very slow minuet, all wearing identical golden masks. It is the same tune only this time it as much a herald of doom as the folk dance was the expression of love and life.
I saw this film twice about 40 years ago and did not manage to find again anywhere on any media (and lord knows I've looked). It is one of the few things whose every detail has remained vivid in my mind ever since.
The "Saragossa Manuscript" by Wojciech Has, whose plot is at about the same time, has some undertones of the "Golden Fern" but does not even begin to match either the latter's lyricism, story line or its more visual aspects such as a superb, bold and expressive photography. The expressiveness of some of the characters, such as that of a fortune teller who warns our hero against the "iron rock" he is in love with and other characters are only comparable with some of Eisenstein's or Bergman's 'designs' though without the deliberate expressionist exaggeration of the former. In fact, the strongest point of the film is the way the plot, the acting, the photography and the music bind in tight whole.
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