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The miniature epic of a thoroughgoing education, along the lines of Eliot's "raid on the inarticulate." Gavino Ledda the illiterate turned linguist, handing the wooden staff to the actor who plays his father in the film about his life. Sardinia is not so much a location as a brutish state of mind, the boy (Fabrizio Forte) is yanked out of elementary school by the tyrannical patriarch (Omero Antonutti) to tend the herd in rocky pastures. "Mandatory poverty," solitude and beatings, the need to "fight your bearings" amid elemental harshness. (Rustling trees, howling wind, tolling bells, disembodied thoughts and mighty farts add to the remarkable tessitura.) "Salt in your milk is fortifying," shit in your milk triggers the carnal slapstick of the cacophony of moans sweeping across the village, from afternoon flings to chicken-humpers. The epiphany of music, an earful of Strauss to rouse the protagonist aged twenty (Saverio Marconi) and inaugurate the new stage of the bildungsroman. The image is spare yet charged, the tone forbidding yet elating, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani specialties. The serfdom of ignorance, a long piss on it. "Shepherds can fly without wings," booms the father, an overbearing ogre nevertheless briefly seen eating homemade ice-cream like a shy kid. Italian cinematic history pervades the journey—traveling accordionists from Fellini, severe landscapes from De Seta, above all the neo-realismo of Rossellini locked in its own paternal-filial clash with the expressionistic filmmakers. Latin words in the belly of a tank, overthrow of the mighty oak. The military chum voices the theme, "improve your vocabulary" (Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). Ledda returns in the coda, for the benefit of Kiarostami. With Marcella Michelangeli, Marino Cenna, Stanko Molnar, and Nanni Moretti.
--- Fernando F. Croce |