The most Italian of current-day filmmakers is actually Sicilian. Giuseppe Tornatore, the man who made “Cinema Paradiso,” lays this fact out there in exhaustive — and sometimes exhausting — detail in his new film, “Baaria.”
A decades-tripping account of a Sicilian town very much like the director’s own, “Baaria” starts off with a child in a dead run across the town. It never lets up its momentum from there.
Seriously: Scenes flicker by in a breathless cavalcade that defeats the notion of conventional storytelling. Instead, we get a large, sunny impression of a place and a population, a nostalgic litany of old ways.
It begins in the early part of the century with the town of Baaria a dirt-road spot that gradually mutates into a much larger place as the film goes on. A shepherd, known for his ferocious set of teeth (he can lift weights by biting down on a rope), will become the patriarch of a family we follow.
His son Peppino Torrenuova (Francesco Scianna) is the central figure in the saga, an agitating type who gets involved in left-wing politics in the aftermath of the Mussolini era. His wife (Margareth Made) is a patient woman who raises his family through a variety of political upheavals in Sicily.
One of their sons is meant, we assume, to be a stand-in for the director: a lad who becomes movie-mad (he collects projectionist’s discarded frames from film prints, lovingly gazing at tiny fragments of favorite movies) and wants to be a photographer as a teenager.
The sheer number of scenes in this film’s 2½-hour running time is staggering, especially given that most of them last for less than a minute. It must have been an enormously expensive way to make a movie, but Tornatore went for broke; he constructed the set of the town from scratch on a sun-saturated location in Tunisia.
The cast list includes a number of big Italian stars, most of whom have very fleeting roles. Monica Bellucci, from the “Matrix” pictures and “The Passion of the Christ,” is one example: a major European icon whose time onscreen lasts about 30 seconds, as an unnamed character in a very compromising position.
The sketchy style of the movie, which goes straight to the heart of every moment, tends to create a series of noisy, boisterous moments. I found it mostly unengaging, although it’s certainly an interesting way to approach a large canvas.
“Baaria” is easily pegged as a very Italian picture, or very Sicilian, to be exact about it. Which means if you are easily seduced by scenes of landscapes and food preparation, or small-town Mafioso accepting bribes and families shouting at each other across rustic dinner tables, you’ll find plenty to enjoy in this rather crazy spectacle.
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