World View
BERNANDO BERTOLUCCI is one of the most renowned Italian directors of the last few decades. However, he treated his home country as Buñuel did Spain. It rarely appears in his movies, indeed, he is considered a Hollywood director by many. In Stealing Beauty, an enjoyable if at times crass latter-day coming of age fable, Bertolucci depicts rural Tuscany as the playground of bored middle-class Westerners. There is little of the Italian point of view, the native characters are unconvincing.
In another world from Bertolucci, some postwar Italian filmmakers have a habit of capturing the essence of Italy, mixing romanticism with realism, like the period’s writers. The Taviani brothers made many films, often adaptations of successful books, many of which expose the horrors and the hope of individuals trapped by the inability to fulfil their dreams. 1977’s Padre Padrone is an adaptation of the autobiography of self made man Gavino Ledda, a Sardinian shepherd turned scholar.
Torn from the classroom of his infants’ school and made to tend to sheep alone on a mountain, Gavino grows up illiterate. The sensations and sounds of the hills begin to seep into his being, and his rough ways embarrass him when he enrols in an army academy on the mainland. With the help of a new found love for learning, Gavino begins to cripple the tyrannical authority of his father, producing some achingly touching scenes.
In recent years, Nanni Moretti appears to be one of the Italian directors taking on the mantle of the Taviani brothers. Having appeared in Padre Padrone as an actor, Moretti’s debt to the Taviani brothers can be seen in both his lighthearted approach to the beauty of the everyday and his sincerety to emotion. His 2001 Cannes Palme d’Or winner, The Son’s Room, opens on a happy family who enjoy the idiosyncrasies and straightforward pleasures of their lifestyle.
Moretti’s protagonist is a psychoanalyst, the neuroses he encounters at work providing a stark contrast to his own calm existence. When tragedy strikes his family at random, Moretti’s take on the emotional loops suffered by the family has an powerful delicacy.
8th Jun 2006