Venice Film Festival: On the Lido, Venice’s seaside strip, dogged sunbathers were still working on their end-of-season tans and splashing in the lukewarm Adriatic as festival-goers piled into the Casino for the press screening of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Baaria — the opening film of the 66th Venice Film Festival.
Lifeguards would have been useful inside the cinema too, as it was difficult to keep one’s head above the surging emotional waves of veteran composer Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack — his first feature film work in five years.
But Morricone’s old-fashioned battering ram of a score (as in ‘underscore’) is all of a piece with this rambling, overlong but reasonably effective three-generational Sicilian epic. Tornatore never was a subtle filmmaker, but as the Oscar-winning Nuovo Cinema Paradiso proved, he’s about as close as Europe gets to a director of Big Stories in the Hollywood mould.
Baaria is the dialect name for Bagheria — Tornatore’s hometown. Once known for the elegant summer residences that Palermo’s aristocrats built here, Bagheria was later associated more with the Mafia and corrupt local politicans. Tornatore sets out to do for Bagheria what Fellini did for Rimini in Amarcord — storyboard that mixture of memory and invention that we all apply to the place where we grew up.
The rambling plot focuses on Peppino (a character based loosely on the director’s father), a shepherd’s son who joins the Italian Communist party, marries a local beauty, emigrates briefly to France when times get hard and later, back in Sicily, becomes a city councillor.
Hardly the stuff of high drama. But the focus on an ordinary hero, played convincingly by relative unknown Francesco Scianna, supported by Margareth Made, grounds Tornatore’s Baroque Sicilian penchant for flashy zooms and over-the-top local caricatures.
At least Venice can claim to have opened with a halfway decent Italian film with good commercial genes — an event that happens, as they say in Italy, ‘ogni morte di Papa’, or around as often as we lose an old Pope and get a new one.
Baaria
