The fine and distinguished UK critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian described this historical epic – reportedly the most expensive Italian film ever made – as a 'colossal Stella Artois ad". To be sure, the surface of this, the ninth feature from director Guiseppe Tornatore, perhaps most famous for 1988’s Cinema Paradiso, has the kind of chocolaty gleam in its look one casually associates with up-scale products, or tourist ads. Even the cast have the sculptured perfection of spokesmodels. There are a lot of beautiful cheekbones here and they pose a serious competition to the majesty of the setting, Tornatore’s Sicilian home town of Bagheria.
Still, Bradshaw wasn’t well-meaning when he called this generational saga an advertisement. But then, we’ve had a couple of generations of filmmakers from Ridley Scott to Michael Bay who’ve adopted (or is that co-opted?) a pushy, too beautiful to be true TV commercial aesthetic and made a nice career out of it, too, so does anyone really equate beauty with shallowness anymore? Or to put it another way, what’s Tornatore selling here, with his sweeping camera moves, lush score (by Ennio Morricone), and well-fed extras? (Even if, as it happens, said extras are actually playing paupers.)
Well, in part he’s paying homage to childhood, memory, family and ideals. It might look like an ad but Tornatore has put a lot of passion and, it seems, thought into this and there’s a fine irony in the movie's style. Baarìa’s hero is a communist and a large slab of the movie’s over-long running time of 2½ hours is dedicated to describing the complex political life of Sicily over a 50-year period, beginning in the '20s and ending in the '60s. So the gloss seems to be a way to seduce the audience into a plotline that seems less than glamorous.
We first meet Peppino (played in adulthood by Francesco Scianna) as an unruly kid of Palermo, the son of a shepherd. For him, communism seems an answer to both fascism and the Mafia. As artfully staged as much of this is, Baarìa is dramatically flat. This is because the film doesn’t have much of a feel for plot or action. Still, there are some really striking episodes that beautifully articulate both the social and political divisions of Peppi’s world with their emotional cost; like the poor proud starving woman who buys scraps of food to fry up so the aroma of cooking will convince her neighbours that her family is thriving. (As opposed to dying!)
Tornatore’s politics are humanistic; Peppi’s communism isn’t so much an ideology but a way of saying to the world, ’Don’t let the bastards grind you down’. But then, perhaps any kind of interpretation of the film in political terms is a dead-end. After all, the movie begins with a kind of fantasy; Pietro, the son of Peppi, runs through the streets of Palermo and takes flight. He gazes at the ancient city. What follows is a story about how his ancestors, lived, fought, and died, what they believed and what made them different. It’s an elegant set-up and a fine testament. Pity then, that the film is so dull.
