Directed by Giorgio Diritti
(Italy, 2009)
Giorgio Diritti’s new feature film L’uomo che verrà (The Man Who Will Come) begins in blue darkness, a poor farmer’s bedroom, the mother and father in one bed, nuzzling quietly, and their ten-year-old daughter Martina (Gretta Zucchi Montanari) watching from her cot in the corner. The film concludes here, too, in the bedroom’s same blue shadows, with the beds now rumpled and empty. Where once there was life, a family, nothing remains.
Diritti’s visually powerful and award-winning movie recreates the impoverished world of hardworking sharecroppers in the Apennines near Bologna during World War II. Through one family—and particularly their daughter Martina’s silent observations (she hasn’t spoken since an infant brother died years before)—we plunge into wintertime 1943–44 and experience the cold, damp, and painfully humble existence of farming life. There are no amenities and hardly any food, though the adults work themselves to exhaustion, their faces prematurely careworn. Half of what they produce must go to their landowner—eggs, wine, crops. The war has magnified their difficulties, for instance, they have to slaughter a pig in secrecy to avoid a Fascist tax. And they can’t leave the land for better opportunities, for their illiteracy makes them dependent on sleazy local officials who tell them lies to ensure their relatively slave labor. We closely observe the daily routines and crises of the farmer’s world; the bare bones living conditions illuminated by oil lamps; the traditions and mores of a particular community; the dialect spoken; the rudimentary schoolroom; and the central role of priests, the church, and household shrines. The priests are the peoples’ leaders and protectors; prayers to saints on the kitchen shelf might alter disasters.
Through Martina’s large, watchful eyes we drink in the details of the German occupation of the village. As restrictions and economic hardship escalate, the younger farmers decide to become partisans and depart for the woods. Reprisals occur as soon as the partisans begin their anti-German strikes. Martina’s luminous eyes witness most of these horrors, including, at the climax of the film, the Nazi’s murder of her mother (Maya Sansa) and the village massacre. The movie is based on a real event, the Monte Sole Massacre of September–October 1944, near Bologna.
As with any horrific war story, something spiritual has to happen, whether it’s redemption or hope, for life goes on, and good people remain on the earth once all the devastation is over. The movie continually contrasts nature’s serene beauty—winter woods, falling snow, springtime’s rolling green hills—to human cruelty (Nazi atrocities beyond comprehension), and in so doing deepens the heartbreak. At the same time, the film avoids sentimentality, for, despite its realism, Martina is not an ordinary child. She is ethereal, part angel, or an immortal being planted on earth to carry out some mission for the good—in this case to save a baby (her newborn brother) from the conflagration. This baby is symbolic for the restart of human life in the wake of evil destruction. He is a baby Jesus—man’s hope and salvation. Martina appears different from everyone else—in gentle browns and sepias, partly because of her natural coloring, but also to separate her out. It’s as if the farming community’s deeply rooted religious traditions (part superstition) are embodied in the movie’s central figure Martina, turning the film into a subtle parable, they way horrific war stories often become told. The title—The Man Who Will Come—links to these parable or even fable roots and also threads through the full array of human religion and superstition. We will be saved.
The film’s original music by Marco Biscarini and Daniele Furlati brilliantly intensifies peak moments in the film. Its penetrating, hauntingly grieving sounds hark back to Greek tragedies. Martina’s father Armando (Claudio Casadio) goes deaf when a grenade explodes near him, and subsequent scenes from his perspective feel dizzyingly confused because of the way sounds come to him like waves of cloudy murmurs. He stumbles instead of walks, the disorienting sounds affecting his equilibrium. In a similar way to Marco Bellocchio’s Buon giorno notte (Goodmorning Night, 2003), music and sound in L’uomo che verrà amplify and convey the deeply interior mental states of the characters.
La notte di San Lorenzo (Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982) by the Taviani brothers is a related film showing village life and havoc during the Nazi occupation and terror by Fascist Blackshirts. Both films have young protagonists witnessing events. La notte di San Lorenzo now seems “romantic,” despite its horrors, when compared to Diritti’s realism. In 2010, with wars and terrorism constant, we hear his message clearly: This is how it was, this is how it still is; this is unacceptable, so why does this human cruelty and devastation never stop? We must keep looking at it to try to prevent it.
Last year, Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere came out, a dark, sinister portrayal of Mussolini and Fascism through the story of his wife Ida Dalser. Bellocchio’s message to the world was similar to Diritti’s: Don’t forget! Don’t let nations drift down this road again.
For screening times visit the San Francisco International Film Festival http://fest10.sffs.org
© 2010 Gail Spilsbury, all rights reserved
Photo: www.sffs.org
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