Giuseppe Tornatore’s emotional homage to his natal city has an interesting visual narrative for most of the film but I didn’t particularly enjoyed his storytelling technique that looked more like if I was watching a moving old photo album and definitively this technique breaks the story into fragments of moments that not necessarily all show continuity even when he does some kind of morphing to represent that the young character became adult. Honestly I highly disliked those special effects.Basically the story tells about Peppino Torrenouva since he’s a very young kid with bad temper, grows up to be a school boy with problems at school, continues to grow, falls in love, marries, has children and no, he doesn’t live a happy ever life as he’s interested in politics, which makes him most of the time unemployed until he runs for office, wins and prosper. But this story is the excuse to also tell the story of Italy and to show what progress brings to a tiny village that becomes a flourishing city. The village that turns into a city is Bagheria, which locals call by its Phoenician name: Baarìa.
I don’t complain about the story that basically was what kept me watching even when time transitions sometimes left me wondering for a while what happened and took me a while to grab the storyline again. But the movie felt long, too long, as narrative rhythm was like a plain straight line and there were moments somewhere in the middle that I was getting bored and please remember that I enjoy Bollywood movies that are even longer than this one, so was not the length but the monotony what almost made snooze.
Performances are acceptable with mainly unknown-to-me actors and what somehow distract for the not positive are the too brief appearances of known actors like Monica Bellucci or not-so-brief like Raoul Bova or Enrico Lo Verso.
What this movie really has is good tech specs that absolutely will delight your eyes, but you need more than beautiful images to enjoy a movie and this film was weak in everything else.
As you can notice I didn’t enjoyed much the movie and in general I was disappointed as Tornatore has great movies like La sconosciuta, beautiful Malèna and unforgettable Cinema Paradiso. So do I recommend it? Not really, but it’s a Tornatore film and know that many probably already watched; if you haven’t maybe the best way is to rent the dvd for 2 or 3 days to watch like a miniseries, a little each day.
Enjoy!
Watch trailer @MOC
