Baaria

Bea says: We were very surprised to find this Italian gem of a film showing on a Saturday night in a very mainstream cinema complex in Hull recently, and although neither of us had heard of it we decided to see it instead of The Karate Kid.

Going on, I was somewhat concerned about the length of the film (2 1/2 hours). Regular readers know I dislike the current vogue for unnecessarily long films (most just need better and tighter editing). However, every minute of the 2 1/2 hours was needed to tell the story of Pepe and several generations of his family, from the 1920s to the present day, in the village of Baaria in southern Italy.

The film required concentration, as it was postmodern in style with the plot presented out of chronological order, and many scenes involved symbolism, magical realism and dream sequences. In fact, both Cecil and myself felt we wanted to sit right down and watch it all again, to have another chance at getting all the references.

The film deals with universal topics which would strike a chord with most people watching - the choices we make in life, ambition, love and lust, settling down, money, home, what we leave for future generations, and, crucially, how things change around us, whilst as people, our concerns remain the same. Powerful stuff.
***

Cecil says: I actually love films like this - real epics you hardly ever see these days; and with so many characters interlinked you actually feel compelled just to go back in there and watch it all over again so that you can put together some of the connections you almost certainly missed at the first time of asking.

It's also a very reflective film, which made me philosophical on the way out, mulling over big issues, motivations for our actions and all sorts of questioning why we do things.

Sicilian culture is not something I'm familiar with, so even with subtitles for the impossible dialects (and the Romany? language), there are large chunks I'm sure I'll never get, however often I watch this film. But it didn't matter, somehow, because the storyline drew me in and held me for the whole 150 minutes.

Funnily enough I did meet a Sicilian Communist Party member on a holiday some 20 odd years ago. It would be good to meet him again now having seen this film. In the UK we tend to associate Sicily with the Mafia, and this guy I met on holiday made lots of jokes about Mafiosi to local shopkeepers in Scotland, just to get a reaction. They're not the main players in this film, but they are always there, always a threat, and it makes me wonder if my Communist holiday contact is still around today.

I didn't like what Bea calls the 'magical realism' stuff in the film, though. Never a great fan of dream-sequence type of scenes and the film tends to dip in and out of these without any Hollywood-style screen-flickering to tell you - yes, folks, you're back in dreamtime now. Funnily enough the dream bits reminded me of those ads for the olive spread at the moment where the family members fly through the air to catch falling olives.

No, but that apart, hard to fault this film. Though, I want to see it again before I give it star rating...