Venice Film Festival: a political opening with Giuseppe Tornatore's Baaria

For the first time I played a little role in this world famous film festival, hosted by one of the most beautyful cities in the world: Venezia.

I consider myself part of a new generation of viewers, as since the very beginning I had some really hard times with the giant screen. I realized right away that when you get used to the reduced screens of your daily life made of pc, tv and cell phones, the movie theater looks like a sort of monster that instead of capturing your attention it seems you re always loosing something from every scene, as the surface is so huge and the sound so loud it was really hard for me to capture the entire thing. Anyway I tried to do my best and kept watching the movie with all my abilities completely focused and glued to the film.

The setting plays a major role in the narratives as the background made up by set designer Stefano Sabatini is really impressive. From the dirty roads to the aged buildings, you can tell the set was definitely playing a great part in the story as it powerfully projects the viewer into the context that introduces the main character who is not just played by the story's hero Peppino, played by Francesco Scianna but also by the sicilian city of Bagheria, that is the real co-protagonist of the story and not just a simple stage.

The story starts with the protagonist aged 5 who is asked to go buy a box of smokes by an old bad-ass sicilian folk who is playing cards with his old friends sitting outside of a bar in a typical sicilian afternoon context. The narrative journey starts with the kid running and then flying over the city's landscape then landing again as a teenager who is a lazy student and fools around with his friends.

The story structure is made of a series of little episodes that keeps the story moving forward Although the protagonist does not have an explicit and specific goal as it happens with commercial movies, neither there is an unconscious narrative level, the film owns a very strong storyline made by what Jean Paul Sartre called the "Human passion". Indeed Sartre at the very end of his work concluded for a need of phylosophical coherence that the human being is a useless passion.

This is the kind of story that simply subverts Sartre's position, by showing the force behind every human action is in the very end just passion. Civil sense, political passion, family, friendship and more.

The movie makes a great portrait of the italian distressed society that went out from fascism and world war II. A time where inner forces where fighting to lead the country. These forces in Sicily were not just political, as foreinstance the mafia played a major role over the local sicilian communities, where their representatives demanded respect and obedience. The communists were the only ones in the italian island who had the guts of opposing the mafia and helped illiterate people have an education by sending them to their school or just make the new ideas circulating among their militants. The idea of emancipation more than anything else clashed with the Sicilian idea of the woman’s role in society.

Giuseppe Tornatore’s movie is definitely not a Hollywood high concept movie, but you can tell the protagonist leads on a great struggle against the entire world just to keep on living because this is what the story is really about, of which the logline would be: surviving in the Sicilian society of the last century. And this is what was really about for everyone who tried to make a living in Sicily after world war II: a giant struggle among social and political confilicts, plus the mafia and the strong family values. The individual was basically and constantly “under friendly fire” and this is what Baaria masterly portraits better than any other movie that faced this extremely difficult theme before it.

You can tell a movie is a masterpiece when the theme or what Lajos Egri calls “the story premise” have multiple interpretation. It’s a story of political passion and civil sense or it’s a story of a family struggling for a century with the external world or it’s a story of a man who fights everyday to obtain a respectful position into the sicilian society of the twentieth century.

In general as I already said to Giuseppe Tornatore the first time I have met him, this film has a lot of chances to be successful outside of the Italian boundaries, as it will help the foreign audience to understand certain choices made by the italian people after the tragedy of fascism and of world war II. It will definitely help to understand why the communist party reached 36% of voters in Italy in the mid-seventies and what the Sicilian people have faced during the last century and why still have to deal with certain issues today.

It’s not just the story to deal with social and political struggle but it’s the movie in itself that has the chance of playing a major educative role in today’s society to make people understand the choices of a generation that had appearently no way out but successfully made it anyway.