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The title is gently contradicted by the caretaker (Paolo Quadrubbi), counting the days on a calendar with a little shrug: "Eh, che scappa via." Winter up in the Italian Alps, tiny figures around a half-constructed dam, babysitting machinery while Nature goes about its own labor. The replacement (Roberto Seveso) is a college student hoping for a calm spot to study in the off-season heights. Garrulous, pompadoured, a rock 'n' roll fan, the opposite of the middle-aged, taciturn watchman (Natale Rossi), who keeps him at a distrustful distance. Pockets of irritation initially fill the air between them, the squeak of a spring bed or the hammer that rattles the contents of a shelf. Gradually, something like affection grows. "Tempo sereno e la vita è bella." Frost's "A Hundred Collars," patiently cultivated by Ermanno Olmi in a deft, humble comedy of isolation and connection, a quietist corner of an operatic national cinema. The minimalist vaudeville duo wear sweaters as they trudge across frozen expanses, the vet with the Yuletide name has a reindeer embroidered on his while the kid's jersey boasts a huge "R" straight out of Archie Comics. A climate for cozy abstraction, a row of snow angels to fill the Totalscope widescreen, the rumble of an avalanche and the echo of a canal. Monotony is something to be brightened with checker matches and personal remembrances, silence is something to be broken with music and proverbs. ("You swim in wine but you drown in water.") The comfort of an old lantern and a brandy-spiked glass of milk in the middle of a gloomy blizzard, of a belated dialogue in a shelter that, in unstressed Olmi fashion, turns out to be a church. Reichardt in Old Joy indicates a kinship at the other end of a friendship. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |