Film Reviews

Baaria

• Rating:
• Director: Guiseppe Tornatore
• Starring:
• Details: Italy / 150 mins (TBC).

Like Malena and Cinema Paradiso before it, Baaria sees director Guiseppe Tornatore return to his hometown of Bagheria, Sicily, for inspiration in another coming-of-age drama. While Cinema Paradiso explored the impact of film and Malena investigated the influence of WWII on his community (both included a first love story too), Baaria (Bagheria in the Sicilian dialect) shows how politics shaped his birthplace. Fans of Tornatore's work will have seen it all before but they won't care, as Baaria is almost a 'best of' Tornatore. That is Baaria's strength but, unfortunately, its weakness too.
In similar fashion to Fellini's Armacord, Tornatore sets up the small town as a character in itself but once the director stops whipping the camera around its picturesque streets and alleys, introducing all who inhabit the boisterous hamlet (35,000 extras were used) as he does, it's the peasant Torrenuova family, and in particular Peppino (Scianna), that emerge as the focal point. Peppino, frustrated at first the mafia's hold, and then the fascists, over the area, joins the Communist Party to help guide his town through the turbulent years following WWII. His determination is only sidetracked when local beauty Mannina (model Madé making her debut) swishes by.
Those expecting the sentimentality, humour, love, postcard-perfect shots, and the 'movie moments' synonymous with Tornatore are in for a treat as Baaria does everything one would expect from the director. Bathed in an almost sepia tone, Baaria looks beautiful and Tornatore's lens is filled with warm, entertaining characters elbowing each other out of the way for their time in the spotlight. It's a jolly saunter through difficult times.
But Tornatore overcooks it. Conscious that the town's early 20th century history has to be encompassed, every scene is in a race with the next to see which one can finish the fastest. Themes are touched on and subjects are raised but all are deserving of further exploration, which the director refuses to probe; at two-and-a-half hours Tornatore had plenty of time to say what he wanted to say and then some. The habit of fading to black, bookending the chapters of the story, can irritate too.

Review by Gavin Burke