I find it interesting how Italian films often come back to the failure of the Risorgimento, and the way northerners and southerners cant understand each other. From an unlikely place like a comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street, which made a lot of jokes about regional stereotypes, to The Leopard, where Cavour, confident in parliamentarianism cant understand the Sicilian aristocrat's disinterest in political engagement. Now in this film, we see it brilliantly in the exasperated carabinieri who cant understand why they're being shot at, and the Sicilian bandits who envision themselves as part of a great struggle against the mainland, and enact the horrible massacre of the communists who wave the national flag, and of course in the courtroom.
It goes beyond an economic divide between a rich north, which was an industrial powerhouse in the 19th century and enjoyed an economic miracle post-war, and a poor south, mismanaged by the Bourbon and thereafter failed, which opened way for Mafia there. But there's a cultural divide which deepens this inability to understand each other, the Mediterranean South, and Sicily especially, has a different way of talking, a different religiosity, a different landscape.
Rossi understands that the way to understand each other is not by talking but by listening. Here he really has crafted a cinema of listening, he doesn't try to impose any judgement on Giuliano, there's no protagonist, the fractured timeline means we have to piece together what has happened ourselves, he presents views from everyone, often conflicting. Whatever our view coming into the film is of Giuliano, a 'Robin Hood' hero, a violent political fanatic or a pawn part of a much larger anti-communist conspiracy, Rossi nudges us to add nuance to our views, to see all these parts within him. With that, we start to understand the sad complexity of Sicily.
I find it interesting how Italian films often come back to the failure of the Risorgimento, and the way northerners and southerners cant understand each other. From an unlikely place like a comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street, which made a lot of jokes about regional stereotypes, to The Leopard, where Cavour, confident in parliamentarianism cant understand the Sicilian aristocrat's disinterest in political engagement. Now in this film, we see it brilliantly in the exasperated carabinieri who cant understand why they're being shot at, and the Sicilian bandits who envision themselves as part of a great struggle against the mainland, and enact the horrible massacre of the communists who wave the national flag, and of course in the courtroom.
ReplyDeleteIt goes beyond an economic divide between a rich north, which was an industrial powerhouse in the 19th century and enjoyed an economic miracle post-war, and a poor south, mismanaged by the Bourbon and thereafter failed, which opened way for Mafia there. But there's a cultural divide which deepens this inability to understand each other, the Mediterranean South, and Sicily especially, has a different way of talking, a different religiosity, a different landscape.
Rossi understands that the way to understand each other is not by talking but by listening. Here he really has crafted a cinema of listening, he doesn't try to impose any judgement on Giuliano, there's no protagonist, the fractured timeline means we have to piece together what has happened ourselves, he presents views from everyone, often conflicting. Whatever our view coming into the film is of Giuliano, a 'Robin Hood' hero, a violent political fanatic or a pawn part of a much larger anti-communist conspiracy, Rossi nudges us to add nuance to our views, to see all these parts within him. With that, we start to understand the sad complexity of Sicily.
Masterpiece.