Film: Baaría
Release date: 10th January 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 144 mins
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Starring: Gaetano Aronica, Francesco Scianna, Margareth Madè, Raoul Bova, Giorgio Faletti, Leo Gullotta
Genre: Drama/Comedy/History/War
Studio: E1
Format: DVD
Country: Italy/France
As the opening feature of the 2009 Venice Film Festival and Italy’s official submission to the 82nd Academy Awards, hopes were high that Baaría would provide a much needed shot in the arm for the beleaguered Italian film industry. More than twenty years after Cinema Paradiso first charmed audiences throughout the world, Giuseppe Tornatore has made another film of sun-kissed nostalgia, this time armed with a star-filled cast and a £20 million budget.
Tomatore’s semi-autobiographical story is set in his hometown of Bagheria (known by the locals as Baaría), and depicts the lives of three generations of a family and the development of an entire city.
From the 1930s (Mussolini’s black shirts, financial hardship), the war years (bombers in shadow, liberating American soldiers), and the 1950s (communism, the mafia) up to the 1980s (shopping arcades, traffic everywhere), it follows the lives of Cicco, the shepherd, Peppino, his son the communist activist, and Pietro, his photographer grandson.
Focussing mainly on the charismatic Peppino, from his first romantic entanglements, his connection with the Communist Party and involvement in Italian politics, we see a young man growing old as the city changes. And the city, Tornatore suggests, is as much alive as the main character….
Tornatore's models are clearly Amarcord, Fellini's autobiographical masterwork about his boyhood in pre-war Rimini, Bertolucci's five-hour 1900, and Francesco Rosi's portrait of post-war Italy, and Three Brothers, posters of which dominate the scene in the early 1980s when Pietro leaves home to go to college on the mainland. Everything in Tornatore’s film aspires to the same epic grandeur. The camera pulls back to pan out and soar above the expensively constructed sets, Morricone’s score rises up with it, famous faces from Italian cinema pop up in cameo and lead roles amongst the vast cast of extras - everything is designed to tell us that we are watching a big film. The cumulative effect is more reductive than anything. It looks like a masterpiece, but it’s a superficial resemblance. Disjointed and promising much more than it actually delivers, Baaría feels like a two-and-a-half hour trailer for a movie which never truly comes into view.
In the end, Baaría received the Pasinetti Award from Venice, but missed out on the Golden Lion (usually reserved for more serious, innovative cinema) and came away empty-handed from the same American awards where Cinema Paradiso had won an Oscar in 1989. In trying to please the notoriously auteur-favouring Venice, while maintaining his crowd-pleasing brand of sentimentality, Baaría feels conflicted. There’s a cautionary tale there in trying to be all things to all men, for somewhere along the line Tornatore’s vision may have become lost.
It is a shame as there is much in Baaría that is good. Tornatore has unearthed two stars in the making in his two good looking leads, Francesco Scianna and Margareth Madè. Beautiful photography from cinematographer Enrico Lucidi is complemented by the lovely art direction and production design of Maurizo Sabatini and Cosimo Gomez. There are some nice images, some inventive set-pieces; but, crucially, nothing that really stays with us afterwards. Ultimately, by charting the history of a family and a city, the film feels overstretched. There’s too much history, too many characters, and too many complications.
Though charming and often funny, Baaría is more than anything marked by superficiality. Tornatore attempts to disguise it by alluding to great themes with heavy artistic moments (dreamlike sequences, sweeping shots over vista landscapes, slow motion), but inevitably the superficiality shows up. That Tornatore is a sentimentalist is well known, but here we get sentimental without sentiment. The movie touches upon a number of weighty issues (love and marriage, family, poverty and exploitation, the conflict between communism and Catholicism, the weight of tradition, and slowness of social change) but is content merely to touch the surface; its ideas never brought to fruition, nothing to make us think. It’s filled with paradoxes like this, in the discrepancy between what the film promises and what it delivers. A supposedly personal piece about the director’s hometown which feels like the work of a foreigner, a product catering to a foreigner’s idea of Sicily gleaned second-hand from other movies. The work of an auteur, but curiously commercial and conventional in its execution. A film designed to become lost within, but afterwards difficult to recall anything memorable.
Part of the reason Baaría fails to connect is due to its episodic nature. It’s composed of a series of short vignettes that fade to black, like memories. This is a key theme in the movie, but because this aspect only becomes clear towards the very end of the film, and because the narrative mainly follows a linear chronological path, it just comes across as poorly edited. Alain Resnais and Chris Marker explored similar themes concerning time and memory, but Tornatore lacks their intellectual rigour. The film’s main message seems to be things change over time (cars replace cows on the streets, dusty open roads give way to tarmac and shopping centres); there is no discernible deeper meaning. Despite the lengthy running time, we get little in the way of character development. We watch his characters and Baaría change in physical ways (hair turns grey, old buildings are torn down), but nothing more. Just as the fragmented narrative interrupts the flow, the countless cameos offer another distraction. Monica Bellucci seems particularly poorly served when she appears for about ten seconds in a role where she is required to do little more than get her breasts out as she is pawed by an amorous lover.
The biggest disappointment may be the Morricone score. An Il Maestro soundtrack can often be enough to elevate even lesser works, but something about working with Tornatore brings out his worst tendencies. Lachrymose and almost ever-present, there is not one moment when that score isn’t used to tell us exactly what to feel. It’s symptomatic of the film as a whole. Truly great films change with us, offering up new perspectives and insights as we mature. There is little chance of this in Tornatore’s movie where everything is so clearly signposted and designed to elicit only the emotions its director intends us to feel.
Baaría almost redeems itself in the last fifteen minutes; a wonderful slice of magical realism combined with post-modernism, which shouldn’t work but does, hinting at just what this film could have achieved had it been slightly more focussed. Past and present intersect as the figure of Pietro, as a boy, races past Peppino, transported back to the same age as his son, running in the opposite direction down the streets of modern Bagheria; both coming to find something from their past which they thought had been lost. Seeking to equate a lifetime of memories with a split-second afterthought, Tornatore highlights the fact that time passes too quickly for us to appreciate each moment on its own, of which the medium of cinema can only suggest but not replicate. It’s the closest Baaría comes to presenting an actual idea, to articulating any sort of ideology behind its succession of beautiful images. But by then, it’s a case of too little, too late, and Baaría leaves us feeling let down.
Baaría is not a bad film, and much of it is enjoyable. However, Tornatore was clearly aiming for greatness, and Baaría falls significantly short of being a great film. Like looking at someone’s holiday snaps - it’s all very pretty, but it just doesn’t connect. GJK
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