Based on the homonyms epic novel by Franco Vegliani's, Franco Giraldi's new film La frontiera (The Border) has attracted acting luminaries Giancarlo Giannini (Fassbinder's Lili Marlene and Coppola's segment in New York Stories) and Omero Antonutti (Rossellini's Italia anno uno, Saura's El Dorado and the Taviani brothers' Good Morning Babylon).
Playing, respectively, the Austro-Hungarian officer Von Zirkenitz and the wise old Simeone, Giannini and Antonutti are cast as the on-screen elders of the film's co-stars, Raoul Bova (La lupa) and Marco Leonardi (Italiani).
Bova plays Emidio Orlich, a young officer in the Austro-Hungarian army. Every day he has to fight in the name of a decaying empire to which he doesn't feel to belong anymore and for which he doesn't want to risk his life any longer. He goes through a deep existential and identity crisis and decides to desert his own ranks to join the Tsar's troops in the winter of 1916, with the intention to rejoin the Italian army. After being caught by his comrades-in-arms, he is prosecuted and executed.
Cutting to summer 1941, Leonardi is Franco Velich, a young and handsome Italian officer returning to his home island of Dalmatia, now occupied by Italian troops. From the old, disillusioned Simeone he hears the story of fellow-Dalmatian Emidio, whose adventures the audience re-lives through flashbacks. Back in the present, Franco is torn between his loyalty to the Italian army and the consciousness to be serving a nation that he doesn't any longer perceive as his motherland and that has invaded his native Dalmatia.
The film deals with the theme of the difficult condition -both psychological and physical- of those who were born an have grown up in a borderland and have to face the problem of their ethnicity.
Giraldi, who lives in Rome but was born in Slovenia with a Slav mother and an Italian father, identified strongly with his protagonists' identity crises. 'From time to time history imposes upon people a border, a single identity. This is always painful and sometimes tragic,' explains the director of 1979's La giacca verde and 1976's Un anno di scuola.
