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Subjugation, revolt and dissolution are the movements, the style is a punctilious mixture of Flaherty burlap and Soviet poster. "The same age-old story of man's exploitation of man" is played on the Sicilian coast, a leisurely pan of the fishing village at dawn contemplates a horizon lined with sails and lanterns. The primeval yoke of laborers versus wholesalers centers on a family (cf. The Grapes of Wrath), the unjust arrangement is challenged by the young hothead (Antonio Arcidiacono) who's fresh off military service and "thinks differently." Being your own padrone is the dream, down go the Judas market scales and up goes the rebelliously independent vessel. Businessmen wait patiently for local resentment, crummy luck, and the harsh elements themselves to put the agitator back in his place. "I'll bore a hole through you yet," says the worm to the stone. Luchino Visconti's epic portrait of peasant defiance inflamed and squelched, where to live in poverty is to drown on dry land. The oppressive forces are colossal, the shackles of servility span generations, the greedy system is as enveloping as the sea. The impressionable brother is tempted away by smugglers with American cigarettes, the flirty sister is seduced and abandoned by the carabinieri sergeant. "One by one, the tree's branches wither and fall." Nets, barrels, battered stone, gray skies add to the coarse texture, though Visconti's splendiferous eye is not easily suppressed: Ragged women are perched on windswept boulders and suddenly Seurat is evoked, Bellini is heard somehow not incongruously during a communal anchovy-salting gathering. (A doomed couple's kiss is framed against a wall of cacti as locomotive smoke fills the air.) The end of the line is the beginning of a new circle, razzing capitalists in an organization named "Ciclope." All that's left is the protagonist's hard-won consciousness, plus the noble awkwardness of real-life fishermen enacting an aristocrat's version of their own struggle. Cinematography by G.R. Aldo. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |